Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

Karius Raises $50M in Series A Financing

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Karius has raised $50 million in a Series A financing round led by Data Collective and Lightspeed Venture Partners. New investors Tencent and Khosla Ventures, as well as existing investors Innovation Endeavors and Spectrum 28, also participated.

The Redwood City, California-based firm, which spun out from Stanford University in 2014, said it plans to use the funding to support new and ongoing clinical trials, scale up its laboratory capacity, and help commercialize its infectious disease test.

The test will combine next-generation sequencing, proprietary genomics algorithms, and machine learning to enable detection of more than 1,250 pathogens. Detection is based on identifying fragments of cell-free pathogen DNA in patients' blood.

"Clinical results from our early-access program demonstrate that the Karius test allows clinicians to diagnose infections more rapidly and accurately," Karius CEO Mickey Kertesz said in a statement. "We look forward to further broadening availability of our technology in the coming months." 

Matt Ocko, managing partner at DCVC, said in the statement that the new financing would help Karius do infectious disease testing on a "global scale."

The company has been collaborating with early-access partners, including running clinical trials with the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, and it presented data from seven of its collaborations at the American Society for Microbiology meeting earlier this year.

The Scan

Positive Framing of Genetic Studies Can Spark Mistrust Among Underrepresented Groups

Researchers in Human Genetics and Genomics Advances report that how researchers describe genomic studies may alienate potential participants.

Small Study of Gene Editing to Treat Sickle Cell Disease

In a Novartis-sponsored study in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that a CRISPR-Cas9-based treatment targeting promoters of genes encoding fetal hemoglobin could reduce disease symptoms.

Gut Microbiome Changes Appear in Infants Before They Develop Eczema, Study Finds

Researchers report in mSystems that infants experienced an enrichment in Clostridium sensu stricto 1 and Finegoldia and a depletion of Bacteroides before developing eczema.

Acute Myeloid Leukemia Treatment Specificity Enhanced With Stem Cell Editing

A study in Nature suggests epitope editing in donor stem cells prior to bone marrow transplants can stave off toxicity when targeting acute myeloid leukemia with immunotherapy.