NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – New molecular diagnostics platform firm InSilixa has completed a $13 million private financing round.
The funding from Silicon Valley VC firm PointGuard Ventures and private investment group Morningside will support InSilixa's development of MDx platforms based on integrated circuit manufacturing technologies, in particular complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes, PointGuard and Morningside said. InSilixa's products, including its CMOS biochips, are designed to be cost-effective, mass-deployable, and disposable, while also offering superior clinical performance, specificity, and parallelism.
The company's technology is licensed from California Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, Austin, and Stanford University.
Without providing details, PointGuard and Morningside said that InSilixa's first products will focus on highly multiplexed genomic tests for the point-of-care and the near-patient settings for infectious disease detection. The company is developing a platform-based architecture, and its point-of-care systems are able to rapidly identify the infecting pathogen in clinical samples, while also verifying the absence or presence of genetic mutations that cause antibiotic resistance, the investors said.
InSilixa is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and was founded in 2012.