NEW YORK – Neurodegenerative disease diagnostics firm Valted Seq said on Tuesday that it has raised a seed financing round of $10.5 million.
Dongkoo Bio&Pharma led the round, joined by new investor OV Principal Investments and several independent investors.
Valted Seq has been developing a platform called HiF-Seq for collecting single-cell sequencing data from postmortem brains of patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. It plans to partner with biopharmaceutical firms to apply the platform.
"This financing will accelerate the development of our HiF-Seq platform, generating the largest single-nucleus sequence database for Parkinson's disease," Valted Seq interim CEO Nina Urban said in a statement. "Interrogating the transcriptomic fingerprints of this highly complex and poorly understood disease will lead to validated drug targets and biomarkers."
The Gaithersburg, Maryland-based firm has raised at least $17 million in total, with $7 million in pre-seed funding from South Korea-based parent company D&D Pharmatech. It has obtained exclusive rights to evaluate biomarker assays developed at Johns Hopkins University that could be used to diagnose and manage neurodegenerative diseases.
Besides HiF-Seq, the firm is developing minimally invasive assays for detecting poly (ADP-ribose) in cerebral spinal fluid, serum, and serum-derived exosomes for diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, and for assessing c-Abl pathway molecules from the same sample types for diagnosing Parkinson's and related alpha-synucleinopathies.