NEW YORK — Technology incubator Murrieta Genomics said on Tuesday that spinout SimplSeq has raised $2 million in seed funding.
According to Murrieta, SimplSeq intends to use the money to validate its nucleic acid sample preparation technology with external labs, shore up its intellectual property, and bring its first products to the market.
SimplSeq's technology involves covalent binding of single strands of DNA or RNA to solid structures such as beads or plates. This allows for complementary copies of each strand to be made and eluted for testing, so the original nucleic acid can be preserved and reinterrogated.
Murrieta said that SimplSeq's first product will be for isolating nucleic acids from plasma for liquid biopsy assays, but that the company is also eyeing applications for its technology for targeted next-generation sequencing.
Discussions are underway with organizations interested in validating the technology and providing feedback that SimplSeq will use ahead of commercialization, Murrieta added.
"We already have manufacturing, fulfillment, delivery, and billing in place," SimplSeq CEO John Powers said in a statement. "We will have the ability to scale rapidly, as these operations are being outsourced to leaders in their respective areas. We also believe that many of our larger future customers will want to license the technology for use in their applications."