Intabio, Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup focused on instrumentation for accelerating the development of biotherapeutic drugs, completed a $2m seed financing round.
The round was led by Jenny Rooke, Ph.D., Managing Director at 5 Prime Ventures, with participation from Vertical Ventures and Morgan Noble Healthcare Partners, as well as direct investments from Mike Finney, Ph.D. and Bill Hyun, Ph.D.
Dr. Hyun also joined the Intabio team as a technical advisor.
The company intends to use the funds to advance commercialization of quality characterization system for biotherapeutics development.
Led by Lena Wu, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder, and Erik Gentalen, Chief Technology Officer and inventor, of the technology, Intabio is advancing the Blaze™ system, an instrument system that provides rapid detection and identification of subtle protein modifications that can undermine the stability and efficacy biotherapeutic drugs such as monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins.
The Blaze system is comprised of a bench-top instrument, microfluidic chip and reagent kit, and provides (1) separation of protein isoforms by charge heterogeneity analysis, (2) imaging at 280nm for quantitation of each modified protein, and (3) sample preparation and electrospray delivery into an adjacent mass spectrometer in order to identify unknown modifications.
FinSMEs
14/09/2017