NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – SomaLogic said today that it will receive up to $60.5 million in debt and equity financing from Visium Healthcare Partners.
The company said it plans to use the funds to support the development of new life science tools and clinical diagnostics based on its Somamer affinity agent technology.
"SomaLogic's proprietary Somamer and Somascan technologies provide researchers and clinicians with a level of proteomic information that promises to revolutionize how diseases are diagnosed and treated," Visium Partner Avi Amin said in a statement. "We believe that SomaLogic is an incredibly compelling emerging healthcare company and expect that this investment will help accelerate the realization of their ambitious vision and vast potential."
Somalogic's Somamers are essentially short strands of DNA that bind to protein targets in samples of interest. They can then be quantified via microarrays, with the quantity of a given Somamer corresponding to the quantity of its target protein. The company's Somascan product consists of an array of Somamers to 1,310 different protein targets.
To date, the bulk of Somalogic's revenues have come from sales of Somascan services and platforms, but in a statement announcing the Visium deal, Founder and Chairman Larry Gold highlighted the company's diagnostic development ambitions, noting that the new capital would provide it "the opportunity to even more quickly realize our ultimate goal of delivering much-needed new diagnostics tests to the clinic."
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.