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OriGene Raises $16M to Continue Building Antibody Collection

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This story originally ran on March 18.

OriGene Technologies this week announced that it has raised $16 million in its completed Series B financing round.

The proceeds will be used to continue building the company's TrueMab monoclonal antibody collection. In a statement, OriGene said that it aims to build a monoclonal antibody collection that will cover the entire human genome of about 20,000 genes or most of the human proteome.

"The funding will propel us closer to meeting our goal," Wei-Wu He, OriGene's chairman and CEO, said.

IDG-Accel, SBI &TH Venture Capital Enterprise, and Zero2IPO led the round. Previous investors Morningside Venture Investments and President International Development also participated in the round.

According to OriGene, the TrueMab antibodies will be "significantly different" from other antibodies on the market. The company is using authentic human full-length proteins as immunogens in the manufacturing process. As a result, the TrueMab antibodies have been "proven far superior in quality" compared to small peptide-generated monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies, "especially in applications such as flow cytometry and multiplex ELISA assays," OriGene said.

In November, the Human Protein Atlas said it had adopted OriGene's Verify Tagged Antigen over-expression lysates, full-length human proteins for functional studies and antibody validation, and increased the validation success rate to 80 percent from 30 percent [See PM 11/13/09].

Based in Rockville, Md., OriGene calls itself a gene-centric life sciences firm. Its product line includes more than 5,000 purified human proteins and the world's largest cDNA and shRNA clone collections.