NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – DNA sequencing technology company NABsys said today that it has reeled in $4 million in an equity investment round, which it will use to develop its sequencing platform.
The financing round included an investment from Point Judith Capital, Slater Technology Fund, and "other previous investors," the company said.
Providence, RI-based NABsys is developing an electronic, solid-state DNA sequencing technology that it licensed from Brown University. The technology electronically detects the positions of hybridized DNA probes and uses algorithms to reconstruct DNA sequences.
"The technological advantages that the NABsys platform enjoys, namely electronic detection, the use of all solid-state materials, lack of dependence on a polymerase, inherent error checking, and long-range sequence information, will allow the technology to offer clinically relevant cost, speed, and accuracy parameters for whole-genome sequencing," NABsys CEO Barrett Bready said in a statement.
Because DNA sequencing technologies have depended on polymerases and on optical sequencing, the company said, "whole-genome DNA sequencing has remained far too expensive, slow, and inaccurate to be used in clinical care."
"We believe this will be a game-changing technology in the field of genomics," Judith Point General Capital Partner Gina Raimondo said in a statement.