BioNano Closes Big Funding Round on Back of Key Irys Sales

By Bio-IT World Staff

November 21, 2014 | BioNano Genomics, a company headquartered in San Diego whose Irys instrument maps large structural variation in DNA samples, has announced a $53 million Series C financing round, to be invested in international expansion. At Xconomy, Bruce Bigelow reports that the new funding follows a string of overseas sales to major global centers of genomic research, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the Garvan Institute in Sydney, Australia, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in London.

The Irys system is a complimentary technology to high-throughput gene sequencers, like the Illumina HiSeq 2500 and HiSeq X instruments. While sequencers can read DNA to single-base resolution, users normally have to map very short fragments of DNA to a pre-assembled "reference genome" to put the sequence in order. When a sample is very different from the reference genome, because of large deletions, duplications, or transpositions of DNA, these differences can be papered over during the mapping process. The Irys, by contrast, labels key sequences in the genome with fluorescent tags, letting users know where those sequences occur in a given sample. Combining the two technologies can yield both a single-base sequence, and a map of large structural variation.

One major user of BioNano's instruments is the Genome Reference Consortium (GRC), which maintains the human reference genome. (For more on the GRC's use of multiple technologies to improve the reference, see, "The Hunt for a New Human Reference Genome.") Members of the GRC at Washington University in St. Louis are now trying to use the Irys to improve the ways structural variation is incorporated into the reference assembly, potentially making it easier for all geneticists to deal with highly divergent regions of the human genome.

BioNano also hopes its instruments could be used to study certain genetic diseases. So far, however, the Irys has mainly been adopted by specialist institutes with a particular need for near-perfect genome assemblies. BioNano's latest funding round could help the company reach a wider variety of customers, as the company seeks to convince labs that resolving structural variation is essential to getting an accurate picture of the genome.