NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — DioGenix announced today that it raised $3.2 million in a private financing that will support an ongoing prospective clinical trial of its next generation sequencing-based multiple sclerosis test, MS Precise.
The financing involved both new and returning individual investors, the company said, including life sciences fund Nerveda, whose president, Cam Gallagher, is also chairman of DioGenix. Other investors were not named.
"DioGenix has achieved important development and business milestones that pave the way for its lead product to achieve additional clinical progress in 2014," Gallagher said in a statement.
According to DioGenix, the funding follows on interim results from the company's ongoing prospective clinical trial, which it hopes will validate the performance of the assay in identifying patients with MS at their first clinical presentation more accurately than current clinical assessment methods.
In previous studies, the company said, MSPrecise outperformed the current standard of care for cerebral spinal fluid analysis in patients suspected of having MS by almost two to one in terms of specificity with no loss of sensitivity.
DioGenix also announced it has established a new central laboratory, for which it is seeking CLIA certification in order to support future commercialization of the assay as a laboratory-developed test.
The company said it has also expanded a licensing arrangement with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, making exclusive its license of its MSPrecise-related technology.