Sherlock Biosciences, a Cambridge, Mass.-based engineering biology company dedicated to improving diagnostic testing, closed its over $31m Series A funding.
The additional funds bring total committed capital to $49m, including a $17.5m non-dilutive grant from the Open Philanthropy Project.
Backers included:
– Northpond Ventures,
– Baidu Ventures,
– the Open Philanthropy Project, and
– other investors.
Launched in March 2019 by Rahul K. Dhanda, president and CEO, Sherlock leverages engineering biology tools, including CRISPR and Synthetic Biology, to create a new generation of molecular diagnostics that can rapidly deliver accurate results for a vast range of needs in virtually any setting.
Potential applications include:
– oncology,
– infectious disease,
– low-resource settings,
– agriculture, and
– at-home testing.
The company intends to use the funds to advance development programs for its core platform technologies, which include:
– SHERLOCK (Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unLOCKing), a method for identifying specific sequences of genetic material in a sample using CRISPR; and
– INSPECTR (INternal Splint-Pairing Expression Cassette Translation Reaction), which can be programmed to distinguish targets based on a single nucleotide at room temperature, without laboratory equipment.
FinSMEs
23/04/2019