NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Indi Molecular said today that it has raised $300,000 from a new investor, Asset Management Ventures.
With this investment, Indi Molecular has expanded the amount raised in its seed round to a total of $1.8 million, which it will use to further development of its protein catalyzed capture reagents, a synthetic affinity agent technology that the company hopes to market as an alternative to traditional antibodies.
According to the firm, PCCs have several potential advantages over monoclonal antibodies including better specificity and the ability to target regions of proteins not accessible to monoclonals.
Indi Molecular is a spinoff of proteomics firm Integrated Diagnostics. It launched as a separate entity in September with $1.5 million in seed funding from InterWest Partners and company co-founders including Albert Luderer – CEO of both Indi and Indi Molecular – California Institute of Technology researcher James Heath, Lee Hood, and University of California, Los Angeles, professor and inventor of PET imaging, Michael Phelps.
Indi initially aimed to spinoff the PCC business in 2012, but delayed these plans due to difficulties in lining up the needed financing.
The company also announced the recent publication of three peer-reviewed papers detailing use of the PCC reagents for purposes including detection of highly-specific protein regions, diagnosis of HIV, and detection of anthrax.