NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – PathoGenetix today announced it has secured $10 million in Series C financing to further commercialization efforts for its Genome Sequence Scanning technology.
Participants in the round included existing investors Ascension Health Ventures, Excel Venture Management, and HealthCare Ventures. The funding, PathoGenetix said, will be directed at further development of its first commercial system using the GSS technology, called the Resolution Microbial Genotyping System.
The platform includes the instrument, bioinformatics software and database, as well as pathogen-specific assays. Woburn, Mass.-based PathoGenetix said that it anticipates launching the Resolution System in 2014 for food safety testing applications and foodborne illness outbreak investigations.
GSS is culture independent and fully automated from sample preparation to final report, resulting in a reduction in time, complexity, skill, and cost required for its use, compared to other molecular and next-generation sequencing-based approaches, PathoGenetix said. Additionally, GSS provides strain-type information that is comparable to pulsed field gel electrophoresis, the current standard for pathogen typing in foodborne outbreak investigation and response, it added.
Today's deal follows agreements PathoGenetix announced with the US Food and Drug Administration in April, and the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in September. The same month, it forged a deal with Applied Maths focused on rapid pathogen strain typing. The company today said that it is currently conducting customer evaluations with "leading food safety testing labs."
In 2011 PathoGenetix raised $11.5 million in a Series B round. Earlier this month, the company said in a regulatory document that it raised $3.6 million toward a targeted $9.1 million round. That raise was part of the $10M Series C found, a company spokesman said.