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Veritas Genetics Restarts US Business With Near-Term Financing

NEW YORK – Veritas Genetics has restructured its business and is reopening its US operations with a small team of core employees, GenomeWeb has learned.

According to CEO Mirza Cifric, the company has secured an undisclosed amount of near-term financing from unnamed investors, allowing it to restart the US business. In addition, he said the firm is working on closing "a significant round of funding." He declined to elaborate on the potential investors.

Last month, the Danvers, Massachusetts-based company laid off more than 30 employees – most of its US staff – after a financing round it had been working on unexpectedly did not close.

Cifric said the company's previous investors no longer have a stake in the firm. Past investors include Trustbridge Partners and Jiangsu Simcere Pharmaceutical, who led Veritas' Series B Financing round, with participation from Lilly Asia Ventures.

Since last week, Veritas has hired a core team of employees back, allowing it to start issuing genome reports again. Cifric said the company continues to bring back staff members on a daily basis and plans to reopen its laboratory soon to allow it to work through its order backlog for its MyGenome whole-genome sequencing screening test. He added that the firm will take no new orders until the backlog is gone.

Following the close of its US business last month, the company "received an outpouring of support from all over the world," he said, including from potential strategic partners and investors but also from competitors.

Going forward, he said, Veritas will put additional emphasis on diagnostic genome reports, which it has been offering for over a year for $2,600 to $3,600. "It will be a bigger part of our plan going forward because we saw that most people who came to us had some sort of a question that they wanted answered," he said.

"Our mission has really not changed and will not change going forward," Cifric said. "For us, the mission's always been, 'Give the people the best information, the best test that they can afford, and that's a genome, and make it affordable … so more people can get to this information."

 

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