I'm excited that we have recently added a new portfolio company Genalyte to the Claremont Creek digital healthcare family. I'll be joining the Board, and I am looking forward to working with founder and CEO Cary Gunn and the Genalyte team. Genalyte is a developer and manufacturer of advanced biomarker detection technology strategically located right in the center of the San Diego life science community. Claremont Creek Ventures participated in a $11.8 million series b investment syndicate with Redmile Group, Express Ventures, and other returning Series A investors.
I led the investment at Claremont Creek in Genalyte because of its revolutionary technology being applied to the biomarker detection business sector. Genalyte fits perfectly into our digital healthcare investment strategy. We are specifically interested in companies developing the picks and shovels used in the medical sciences discovery area. Since laboratory tools are the scientific work horses behind advances in medical care, we feel that our focus on this sector will yield great benefit to the medical community and patient care. biomarker discovery and detection are poised to undergo a quantum leap in importance, as biomarker profiles that correlate directly to diseases, disease progression, treatment selection and treatment monitoring continue to be discovered. In addition, the pharmaceutical industry is intensely focused on the development of companion diagnostic systems to personalize treatment for patients based on genomic and proteomic profiles. The Genalyte product line will provide advanced capabilities for these tasks.
Genalyte has pioneered an entirely new approach to biomarker detection using silicon chip manufacturing methods. The Genalyte instrument platform incorporates a revolutionary silicon photonics micro-ring technology, using CMOS designed optical and microfluidic consumables. The system can directly measure protein binding between antibodies and antigens or hybridization of nucleic acids without the use of additional reagents or reporter molecules. This technology eliminates the need for complex sample preparation associated with current multiplexed testing, while leveraging the manufacturing advantages of silicon chips. The platform is simple to use, simultaneously analyzes multiple proteins from a single small sample, and rapid – results are available in 15 minutes with just two minutes of hands-on time.
As the company has developed the system over the past few years, academic collaborators have generated multiple peer-reviewed publications that provide important validation for the superiority of the Genalyte detection methodology and the breadth of applications that are possible. Genalyte is now working to finish development of several protein detection panels that are in great demand from pharmaceutical developers, core labs, and hospital laboratories. The platform will be launched this summer, initially addressing the autoimmunity research and testing markets.
Genalyte will be the tenth portfolio company in the Claremont Creek digital healthcare group which includes AssureRx Health, CellScope, Fluxion Biosciences, Geneweave Biosciences, GigaGen, Natera, Tibion, Cureus, and Zipline Medical.