Mission Bio, a US-based DNA analysis spinout of University of California, San Francisco, secured $30m yesterday in a series B round backed by scientific diagnostics firm Agilent Technologies.
Lam Research Capital, the corporate venturing arm of semiconductor manufacturing equipment supplier Lam Research, also injected funding, alongside investment firm Cota Capital and venture capital firm Mayfield Fund.
Founded in 2014, Mission Bio has built a genomics analytics platform called Tapestri to perform DNA sequencing analysis on thousands of cells while distinguishing each one individually for applications including haematology, solid tumour research and genome editing.
Advances in sequencing technologies are considered necessary to give greater insight into genetic variance and rare cells that cause disease so that precision medicines can be developed more effectively.
The series B funding will help Mission Bio grow the market for blood cancer research and start gene editing-focused programs in addition to scaling Tapestri and expanding internationally.
Tapestri has already been tested in blood cancer programs including a study into acute myeloid leukaemia, which involved sequencing 500,000 cells from 70 patients.
Stanford-Start X Fund, the VC fund backed by Stanford University, backed a $10m series A round led by Mayfield in October 2017 that also featured Keiretsu Forum, Tech Coast Angels and Life Science Angels.
The company also received $13.3m of equity funding from undisclosed investors in June 2017 and $28.4m in May 2018, according to regulatory filings, though it is unclear how those overlap with Mission Bio’s series A and B rounds.
Image courtesy of Mission Bio, Inc. The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.