Nabsys Closes $20 Million Financing Round

By Bio-IT World Staff

March 13, 2013 | Nabsys has closed a $20 million Series D financing to support the commercial launch of the company’s positional sequencing system. The company previewed its pre-beta instrument at AGBT last month, giving early users the chance to see the technology at work.   

The financing was led by new investor Bay City Capital with participation from existing investors including Point Judith Capital and Stata Venture Partners.

“Nabsys is at an important transition point as we prepare for commercial launch, said Barrett Bready, Nabsys CEO, in a statement. “This Series D financing will enable us to build a commercial organization that will support launch. Also, because of the scalability of our single-molecule, solid-state, electrical detection technology, we will be able to significantly expand our initial assays and commercialize additional research and diagnostic applications.”

“We’re excited to have the opportunity to help bring Nabsys’ technology platform to market,” said William Gerber, M.D., investment partner with Bay City Capital, in a statement.  “We’re particularly enthusiastic about the near term clinical applications of structural variant analysis.  Structural variants are known to play a significant role in many forms of cancer as well as other diseases, and Nabsys is poised to offer a system that combines superior analytical performance with a simple and fully automated workflow.”

Nabsys’ electronic, solid-state, single-molecule sequencing platform, “finds the locations electronically of probes that have been bound to very elongated molecules,” Bready told Bio-IT World before the AGBT conference.

Initial applications of the system will allow genomic researchers to correctly and quickly assemble the short DNA sequences that are generated by existing DNA sequencing technologies and to analyze structural variation in a high-throughput way. This is made possible by high-speed, high-resolution electronic measurement of DNA molecules that are much longer than those routinely analyzed by existing sequencing technologies. This same type of data will subsequently be used for a variety of clinical applications, including “electronic karyotyping.”