NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Scipio Bioscience said today that it has completed a seed financing round of €1.2 million ($1.4 million) to fund development and commercialization of its first prototype kit for single-cell transcriptomics.
Paris-based Seventure Partners' Quadrivium I seed fund and Bonn, Germany-based High-Tech Gründerfonds participated in the funding.
Scipio uses a proprietary technology based on barcoding in a test tube format to prepare samples for single-cell profiling.
"The costs and constraints of available methods for sample preparation have hampered widespread adoption of single-cell approaches so far," Scipio President Stuart Edelstein, the biophysicist who developed the technology, said in a statement. "We overcome these hurdles by providing a simple kit-based technology, requiring no specific devices, to prepare thousands of cells for profiling studies in a test tube setup. We believe this will make single-cell RNA-sequencing a routine laboratory tool, for the benefit of patients and scientists."
Scipio is housed in the iPEPS-ICM incubator of the Brain and Spine Institute of the Parisian Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. The company said that it plans to expand R&D operations into Germany in 2018.