NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Stratos Genomics today announced it has closed on $2 million in financing to support the further development of, and "strategic discussions" related to the Seattle-based firm's DNA sequencing technology.
The funding will go toward the development of libraries of smaller building blocks, such as dimers and monomers, and the demonstration of sequencing lengths exceeding 100 bases by the end of this year, Stratos said. The funding is from existing shareholders and is an "up round" from $2.1 million that the company raised in June 2011. Stratos also raised $4 million in September 2010.
The firm is developing a low-cost method of sequencing dubbed Sequencing by Expansion that rescales a DNA target into a longer surrogate polymer. The rescaling, it said, allows high-fidelity single molecule detection of long sequences with compact, low-cost nanopore instruments and other technologies.
"In the summer of 2009, we set 36-base sequencing as an initial milestone and after three years of intensive molecular engineering, this goal has been realized," Mark Kokoris, Stratos Genomics' CSO, said in a statement. "With the fundamentals mastered, we are moving into the system integration phase."