NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Menlo Park, Calif.-based Pacific Biosciences today said that it recently received $20 million in funding from new investor Blackstone Cleantech Venture Partners.
With the new funds, Pac Bio has raised $120 million in its latest financing round. It plans to use the resources to support its efforts to bring its Single-Molecule, Real-Time DNA sequencing platform to the market by the second half of 2010. The company said it has raised $193 million since it was founded in 2004.
Pac Bio also announced today that Elaine Mardis, co-director of the Washington University School of Medicine Genome Sequencing Center, has joined its scientific advisory board. Mardis, who has been at the Genome Sequencing Center since 1993, said in a statement that she is “convinced that Pacific Biosciences has the technology that will allow for dramatic advances in sequencing and truly enable ultra fast, accurate, and inexpensive DNA sequencing.”