Lilly Asia Ventures, a regional investment subsidiary of pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly, supported a $23m series A round yesterday for US-based gene sequencing technology developer ReadCoor.
The oversubscribed round was led by healthcare-focused investment firm Decheng Capital, while Vivo Capital and angel investor Hansjörg Wyss also contributed.
ReadCoor was spun out of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering yesterday by the institution’s tech transfer arm Office of Technology Development.
The company will commercialise the institute’s spatial gene sequencing technology, called Fisseq, a three-dimensional visualisation of RNA within cells and tissue that has applications in clinical diagnostics and drug discovery.
Victor Tong, partner at Decheng Capital, and Yuh-geng Tsay, partner at Vivo Capital, will join ReadCoor’s board of directors.
Shawn Marcell, chief executive of ReadCoor, said: “The Fisseq platform has been incubating within the Wyss Institute for several years under the direction of an immensely talented team of scientists and engineers with extensive expertise in next-gen sequencing.
“This has positioned us to begin providing sequencing services to academia and industry almost immediately, and shipping early commercial systems in the near future.”