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BioSkryb Raises $11.5M in Seed Funding

NEW YORK – North Carolina startup BioSkryb announced Wednesday it has raised $11.5 million in seed funding.

Venture capital firm Anzu Partners led the round, joined by Palo Alto, California-based law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

In a statement, Durham-based BioSkryb said the funds will help accelerate its product roadmap and commercialization efforts for its SkrybAmp genomic amplification technology.

The company is commercializing primary template-directed amplification technology, developed by cofounder Charles Gawad at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. Gawad is now a clinical professor of pediatric hematology and oncology at Stanford University. The technology, which allows control of amplicon size and incorporation of barcodes, enables whole-genome amplification, including from DNA from single cells, according to the firm's website.

"Bringing the study of genetics down to the cellular level will lead to unexpected discoveries about normal biology, as well as human diseases such as cancer,” Gawad said in a statement. "The challenge has been that the data quality produced from existing genome amplification methods is insufficient to perform these types of studies. BioSkryb's new, much more accurate genome amplification technology solves this problem and will accelerate our understanding of human and bacterial genetics, and ultimately, be used to develop single-cell diagnostics for oncology and other areas of medicine."

Anzu Partners also participated in the Series B financing for microfluidic cell sorting firm NanoCellect Biomedical.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has participated in the $10 million Series A financing round for personalized medicine firm DotLab and the $18 million Series A round for Cofactor Genomics.

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