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GenapSys Raises $37M to Commercialize NGS Platform

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) –GenapSys said today that it has raised $37 million in a Series B financing round to support commercialization of its next-generation sequencing platform.

The Series B financing includes new investors Yuri Milner, Stanford StartX Fund, and other private and institutional investors.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is developing a next-gen sequencing system called GENIUS 110, which stands for Gene Electronic Nano-Integrated Ultra-Sensitive.

"With this financing and strong backing of our investors, we now have all the pieces in place to deliver on the commercial promise of the GENIUS System and realize a 100x improvement in cost and efficacy as compared to existing technologies on the market," Founder and CEO Hesaam Esfandypour said in a statement.

The firm plans to integrate advanced fluidics and analytical capabilities to develop a sample-to-answer platform for both DNA and RNA.

Last year, GenapSys received nearly $4 million in grant funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute to develop a low-cost electronic DNA sequencer.

As reported by sister publication In Sequence, the goal of the system is to sequence a genome at a consumables cost of $50, generate average read lengths of up to 1,000 bases, and provide a pre-assembly accuracy of more than 99.7 percent (IS 11/13/2012).

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