NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Predicine announced today that it has closed a $13.5 million Series A round of financing.
Chinese venture capital firms Sangel Capital, Rongsheng Investment, and Highlight Capital participated in the round.
Predicine said it will use the funding to advance the commercialization of its proprietary liquid biopsy technology, as well as its use in clinical trials, treatment selection, and cancer screening. The firm also intends to expand its cancer biomarker pipeline.
"Predicine has developed an innovative liquid biopsy test using its proprietary Gene RADAR technology to detect RNA- and DNA-based genetic alterations from a single tube of blood," Predicine Cofounder and CTO Pan Du said in a statement. "This enables the test to capture a broader range of clinically important genetic variants — such as gene fusion and splicing events — in a more efficient way than other DNA-only blood tests currently available."
Headquartered in California, Predicine opened a Shanghai-based R&D facility in late 2016 as part of an effort to build a clinical testing business in China, where it markets next-generation sequencing-based liquid biopsy diagnostics for lung cancer and prostate cancer in partnership with CloudHealth Genomics.