HAYWARD, Calif.--Lynx Therapeutics here has completed a $26.8 million private placement of common stock at $10 per share. Proceeds will go toward finishing development of the company's proprietary Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing technology and building capacity for its early commercial uses. Completion of the financing "predated by a few weeks the first results ever obtained from application of the technology to a real biological system," noted Sam Eletr, Lynx's chairman and CEO.
"These results showed that, even in its very early stages of development, Lynx's technology may well enable the identification of unknown genes, as well as uncover otherwise inaccessible details of gene expression," he continued. "The financing will speed up not only the technology's development, but also, and perhaps more importantly, its early application to a broad spectrum of important biological problems."
Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing technology aims to iden tify short signature sequences from a million or more DNA molecules or fragments at once. Lynx is developing the technology for a number of applications, including gene identification, gene expression profiling, pathogenic genome se quencing, and very high resolution genomic mapping. Founded in 1992, the company has 71 employees.