Alamar Biosciences Raises $80M in Series B Round

Original from: Genomeweb

Alamar Biosciences said on Wednesday that it has closed an $80 million Series B financing round, bringing its total funding to $110 million. 

The oversubscribed round was led by Sherpa Healthcare Partners. Other investors included Morningside Ventures and Samsara Biocapital, as well as existing investors Qiming Venture Partners and Illumina Ventures. 

The company expects the financing to help speed the development of its proteomics platform. 

The platform consists of two proprietary technologies — the NUcleic acid-Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay, or NULISA, and the Attobody antibody engineering platform.

NULISA is an immunoassay, which the company expects to enable earlier detection of cancer and other disorders. It leverages next-generation sequencing to bring ultra-high sensitivity and massively parallel scale to proteomics analysis. 

The Attobody platform is designed to obtain antibodies with picomolar affinities that can better interact with difficult targets such as G protein-coupled receptors and ion channels. 

According to the company, these two technologies combined enable highly-multiplexed detection of protein biomarkers in human plasma with single-digit attomolar sensitivity. 

"We are very pleased to have these top-tier investors supporting our next phase of development. They bring tremendous amount of expertise in life sciences and diagnostics, which will be extremely valuable to us as we build the company," Yuling Luo, Alamar's founder, chairman, and CEO, said in a statement. 

"Despite recent progress in the field there is still no technology that unites two essential goals in proteomics analysis, namely the ability to go as deeply as possible to detect very low abundance proteins and the ability to profile thousands of proteins in a single sample," he added. "This capability will be critical for the discovery and measurement of many proteins in human plasma that are currently undetectable. Alamar’s NULISA and Attobody platforms will help fill this void and will drive a new wave of innovations in research, diagnostics, and therapeutics."

Source: Alamar Biosciences Raises $80M in Series B Round