NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Foundation Medicine today said that it has raised more funds in a Series A round of private financing, bringing the total raised in the round to $33.5 million.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based firm has developed a next-generation sequencing-based test to analyze clinical specimens for molecular alterations in more than 200 cancer-related genes. It plans to optimize the test for clinical-grade analysis of tumor tissues, which it believes will overcome multiple complexities, such as purity, ploidy, and clonality, inherent to tumor genomes.
In addition to founding investor Third Rock Ventures, the latest financing includes new investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Google Ventures. In conjunction with the financing, Brook Byers, a partner at KPCB, and Krishna Yeshwant, partner at Google Ventures, will join Foundation Medicine's board of directors.
"KPCB and Google Ventures bring diverse industry-leading expertise that will help us continue our advance toward a national commercial launch of our cancer diagnostic test in 2012," Foundation Medicine President and CEO Michael Pellini said in a statement. "We are continuing to build upon the momentum achieved through our collaborations with Novartis and Celgene announced earlier this year, and we have leveraged our strong financial position to support CLIA certification in the fourth quarter of this year followed by a successful commercial launch."
The firm had announced in April 2010 that it had raised $25 million in the Series A round.
The company also filed a document with the US Securities and Exchange Commission this past August disclosing that it had raised $10 million toward a targeted $20.5 million financing round. A company spokesman declined to comment on the filing at the time.