NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Rheonix has closed on a $6 million extension to its Series A financing round, bringing the total raised in the round to $18.6 million.
Tony Eisenhut, the firm's president, told GenomeWeb Daily News today that the funds will be used to continue developing four tests: a warfarin-sensitivity test; a sexually transmitted disease panel; an HIV panel; and a CYP2C19 test for predicting response to the anti-platelet drug Plavix (clopidogrel).
The funding will also go toward continued development of Rheonix's fully automated molecular assays for oncology applications.
"We've been able to go from raw tissue sample, FFPE tissue sample, through end-point detection without any technician intervention [and], fully automated on" the company's CARD, or Chemistry and Reagent Device, system, Eisenhut said.
Participants in the round included existing investors Cayuga Venture Funds, Rand Capital, Hua Nan Venture Capital, Onondaga Venture Capital Fund, and individual investors.
The $6 million private equity infusion comes on top of $12.6 million raised in the Series A round announced in April 2010.
Eisenhut said in June that the firm planned a submission to the US Food and Drug Administration for its warfarin-sensitivity test in the fourth quarter of 2011. He said today that the timeline has been pushed back to the second-half of 2012 due to the company's decision to automate its oncology platform.
The company also has a deal with the Mayo Clinic to evaluate the performance of a separate warfarin-sensitivity test being developed based on Rheonix's IP.
Rheonix's lead technology is its CARD system, a microfluidic platform that fully automates all the functions of a molecular biology lab on a small disposable chip.
In December the firm announced it had completed development of a microarray production technology to create a high-fidelity microarray that provides simple, multiplexed end-point detection for molecular assays. It said at the time that though it intended to use the technology to improve detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms on the CARD system, the technology is "broadly applicable to meet the need for high volume production of high quality/low density microarray, and therefore, has licensing potential for use in multiple research and clinical applications."