Population Genetics raises £3.8m in Series A funding; appoints CEO
Population Genetics Technologies Ltd, a private company focused on creating new paradigms for performing large-scale population genetics studies, said it has raised £3.8m in a first round of venture funding.
The venture financing was provided by Auriga Partners, Noble Fund Managers, and Compass Genetics Investors LLC.
The Babraham Research Campus- based company also said it had appointed Mel N. Kronick as CEO and board member. Dr Kronick was former division R&D manager at both Agilent Technologies and Applied Biosystems.
Joining Dr Kronick on the PGT board are Bernard Daugeras, Managing Partner of Auriga Partners, and Stephane Mery, Director, Healthcare Investments, at Noble Fund Managers. Sam Eletr, former acting CEO of PGT, will now serve as chairman: Dr Eletr was founder of Applied Biosystems (the company that developed the first and most successful DNA sequencing machines) and Lynx Therapeutics (the company that pioneered the genesis of the emerging next generation sequencing technologies).
Mark Treherne, a former research executive at Pfizer, who has founded several UK biotechs and served as chairman of the PGT board until now, will remain on the board.
PGT was started in 2005 with seed funding from the Wellcome Trust's Technology Transfer Division to develop and commercialise several novel concepts for studying populations that were proposed by Sydney Brenner, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. Dr. Brenner has noted that “this new technology will enable users to discover shared gene variants characteristic of a particular disorder or a specific response to drugs without the need to sequence separately every individual genome in a particular population.”
Dr Eletr said: “Advances in technologies designed to obtain DNA sequence information are moving at a significant pace. Our new method, if successful, will be a huge leap forward, as it is expected to reduce significantly the cost of using any sequencing technology, however efficient, that can analyze only one genome at a time.”
22nd February 2008
