Pathogenetix Blog PathoGenetix Announces $10 Million Series C Financing

Funding will support the commercialization of PathoGenetix's rapid bacterial identification technology for use in food safety testing and public health foodborne outbreak investigations.PathoGenetix , Inc., a commercial-stage developer of an automated system for rapid bacterial identification, announced today that it has secured $10 million in a Series C financing to fund continued efforts to commercialize its Genome Sequence Scanning (GSS ) technology. The commitment was received from existing investors including Ascension Health Ventures, Excel Venture Management and HealthCare Ventures.The GSS technology confirms and identifies microbial DNA in either complex mixtures or isolates, and provides actionable information in five hours. The funding will be used to further develop the first commercial system using the GSS technology, the RESOLUTION Microbial Genotyping System. The fully automated RESOLUTION System includes the instrument, bioinformatics software and database, and pathogen-specific assays, and will be commercially available in 2014 for use in food safety testing and foodborne illness outbreak investigations."This commitment from our investors reflects the outstanding progress we have made toward commercialization of the GSS technology," said Ann Merrifield, President and CEO of PathoGenetix. "As we continue our efforts to deliver the RESOLUTION System for rapid pathogen strain typing, we also are gaining excellent market traction in the key public health and food industry sectors."The company announced collaborations with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in April and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in September, and is currently conducting a series of customer evaluations with leading food safety testing labs. In June, the company signed an agreement with Applied Maths, NV, to link the RESOLUTION System with the BioNumerics software suite currently in use in thousands of public and private research sites and laboratories around the world."We are excited about the potential for the GSS technology in a range of industrial, research and clinical applications. PathoGenetix product development and research continue to demonstrate clear benefits for use in the food industry. We also believe the technology has significant potential in research and clinical applications such as microbiome analyses and genome mapping." Tara Butler, MDManaging DirectorAscension Health VenturesBecause GSS is culture independent and fully automated from sample preparation to final report, the technology greatly reduces the time, complexity, skill and cost required when compared to other molecular and next generation sequencing (NGS) identification approaches. The strain-type information provided by GSS is comparable to pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), the current standard for pathogen typing in foodborne outbreak investigation and response. As a result, GSS offers a powerful new tool for food industry pathogen traceback and public health epidemiological investigations, and can enable quicker decisions affecting food safety and public health.