NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – California-based startup Mission Bio said today that it has completed a $10 million Series A financing round.
The financing will support the launch of the firm's single-cell DNA analysis platform, Tapestri. Mayfield Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, led the round.
The Tapestri instrument incorporates droplet microfluidic technology that Mission licenses from the University of California, San Francisco and which researchers described earlier this year in a Nature Biotechnology study.
The complete Tapestri platform includes the instrument itself, consumables, and software. It will initially support a targeted panel for acute myeloid leukemia that will begin shipping in December. The instrument will have a throughput of up to 10,000 cells.
"Delivering the right medicine to every diseased cell in a patient requires an understanding of the complex cell-to-cell variations that drive disease," Mission Bio CEO Charlie Silver said in a statement. Single-cell DNA analysis "will enable the development and delivery of precision medicine based on the unique genome profile of each patient," he added.
Mission Bio has been working with early access users from Stanford University and MD Anderson Cancer Center. Koichi Takahashi, an early access user and assistant professor at MD Anderson, said in a statement that bulk sequencing misses "important insights in cellular heterogeneity," adding that "single-cell analysis is critical to better understanding precision therapy selection at diagnosis as well as disease monitoring and subsequent treatment strategy."