NEW YORK – Proteomics firm Seer said on Tuesday that it has spun out a new healthcare company, PrognomIQ, supported by an initial $55 million financing round.
The new company will use Seer's Proteograph proteomic platform along with other omics data to develop and commercialize clinical tests for cancer and other diseases.
The financing round was led by venture capital fund aMoon, with participation from existing Seer investors including Fidelity Management and Research, Invus, Maverick Ventures, Emerson Collective, Wing VC, and new investors including Bruker.
Philip Ma, founder and former chief business officer of Seer, is CEO of PrognomIQ, and Seer will retain a roughly 19 percent stake in the new company.
Seer's ProteoGraph platform is based on the observation that nanoparticles, when incubated in a biological sample, collect proteins that form a "corona." These nanoparticles can serve as an enrichment tool, allowing researchers to pull proteins out of a sample to identify and quantify, using technologies like mass spec.
"We believe that our Proteograph will enable novel insights and methods that will lead to ecosystems of new end markets and companies that do not exist today," Omid Farokhzad, CEO and founder of Seer, said in a statement.
"The understanding of biology has advanced tremendously through large-scale genomic data collection capabilities. Yet, despite these advancements, researchers and clinicians do not have the functional context at the protein level for the bulk of this genomic information, significantly limiting its utility,” said Ma. "Seer’s Proteograph will give PrognomIQ the ability to characterize this proteomic information, at scale, which we believe will be critical for the development of valuable tests in the future."
He added that the company planned to focus on "early detection, treatment, and recurrence monitoring of cancer and other complex diseases."