Sherlock Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based engineering biology company, raised $35m in funding.
The financing included:
– a $17.5m non-dilutive grant,
– an investment from the Open Philanthropy Project, and
– support from additional undisclosed investors.
The financing will be used to advance development programs and design new assays.
Founded by scientific pioneers and diagnostics veterans Omar Abudayyeh, James J. Collins, Rahul K. Dhanda, Todd Golub, Jonathan Gootenberg, Deborah Hung, Pardis Sabeti, David Walt and Feng Zhang, Sherlock Biosciences is an engineering biology company dedicated to making diagnostic testing fast and affordable,
It is using Engineering Biology tools, including CRISPR and Synthetic Biology, to create a new generation of molecular diagnostics that can rapidly deliver accurate and inexpensive results for a vast range of needs in virtually any setting without complex instrumentation, opening up a wide range of potential applications in areas including precision oncology, infection identification, food safety, at-home tests, and disease detection in the field.
The company takes its name from one of its foundational platform technologies, SHERLOCK™ (Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unLOCKing), which is licensed from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
It is also developing INSPECTR™ (INternal Splint-Pairing Expression Cassette Translation Reaction), a Synthetic Biology-based molecular diagnostics platform developed by a team led by co-founder James J. Collins, Ph.D., at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The technology, licensed from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, can be programmed to distinguish targets based on a single nucleotide without an instrument, at room temperature.
Used as stand-alone tools or in combination, these platforms allow for the detection and quantification of targets without complex instruments and in a variety of potential settings. The flexibility and modularity of these platform technologies open a wide range of potential applications and actionable insights in areas including precision oncology, infection identification, food safety, at-home testing, and disease detection in the field.
FinSMEs
21/03/2019