NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Nanopore-based sequencing firm Quantapore today announced it closed a Series B financing round raising up to $35 million.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm did not disclose the name of the investors but said that the funds will go toward finalizing the development of its sequencing technology and commercializing its platform.
The final amount of the raise will depend on whether Quantapore meets certain milestones before all funds are released, Quantapore CEO Martin Huber said in an email.
As In Sequence reported in 2012, Quantapore is developing a "novel, massively parallel sequencer" for the "rapid, affordable, and accurate sequencing of entire genomes." According to the company's website, its approach, unlike other nanopore-based methods, uses an optical read-out "which results in lower cost and higher throughput compared to electrical data acquisition. Our proprietary sequencing technology will also eliminate other bottlenecks associated with today's sequencing technologies, namely laborious sample preparation and short read length."
In a statement, Huber said "We've come a long way and believe that our optical nanopore technology, with its low cost, long reads and no need for either classical library construction or clonal amplification, has the potential to become a game changer." He added that the firm's benchtop instrument "will be able to sequence any type of nucleic acid, from unfragmented whole genomic DNA, cDNAs, or PCR amplicons, to direct RNA sequencing."