August5,2020 | Sema4 gets $121M tobuild dynamic models of human health and defineoptimal, individualized health trajectories.Glioblastoma, hematology, and acutepancreatitisall see new funding for therapy development. And AI-powered models net cash.

$257M: Series B for Liquid Biopsy for Multiple Cancers

Thrive Earlier Detection, Cambridge, Mass., closed$257millioninSeries Bfinancing. Funds will help advanceCancerSEEK, aliquid biopsy test designed to detect multiple cancers at earlier stages of disease, into registrational trial. The round was led byCasdinCapital and Section 32, with participation from new investors Bain Capital Life Sciences, Brown Advisory, Driehaus Capital Management, Intermountain Ventures, Janus Henderson Investors, Lux Capital, and more.

$121M: Series Cfor Data-Driven Health Intelligence

Sema4, Stamford, Conn., closed a Series C round led by BlackRock with additional new investors including Deerfield Management Company and Moore Strategic Ventures. Sema4 is dedicated to transforming healthcare by building dynamic models of human health and defining optimal, individualized health trajectories. The company began with an emphasis on reproductive health and recently launched Sema4 Signal, a family of products and services providing data-drivenprecision oncology solutions. Over the last several months, Sema4 has also joined the fight against COVID-19. Sema4 has integrated its premier clinical and scientific expertise with its cutting-edge digital capabilities to deliver a holistic testing program that enables organizations to make fast, informed decisions as they navigate COVID-19. The company has also launchedCentrellis, an innovative health intelligence platformdesigned to provide a more complete understanding of disease and wellness and to offer physicians deeper insight into the patient populations they serve.

$112M: Series C for Phase 2 for GlioblastomaTreatment

Imvax, Philadelphia,raised $112 million in series C financing from existing investors HP WILD Holding AG, Ziff Capital Partners, Magnetar Capital, and TLP Investment Partners, and new institutional investor,Invus. The funds will to support Phase 2 Clinical Development of IGV-001 for treatment of Glioblastoma multiforme, Phase 1 research into additional solid tumor indications, and will help build out corporate and manufacturing capabilities.

$97M: Series C for Hematology, OncologyTherapies

AntengeneCorporation, Shanghai,has closed $97 million in Series C financing led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with additional support from new investors including GL Ventures (an affiliate of Hillhouse Capital) and GIC. Existing investors includingQimingVenture Partners andBoyuCapital also participated. Proceeds from the Series C financing will be primarily used to fund the continuing clinical development ofAntengene'srobust pipeline of hematology and oncology therapies, expanding in-house research and development capabilities and strengthening the commercial infrastructures in APAC markets.

$71M:AccelerateFinger-PrickBloodAnalyzer

Sight Diagnostics, Tel Aviv, hasraised$71million from Koch Disruptive Technologies,LonglivVentures, a member of the CK Hutchison Holdings andOurCrowd. The investment is meant to fuel Sights R&D into the automated identification and detection of diseases through its FDA-cleared direct-from-fingerstick Complete Blood Count (CBC) analyzer.Thenew investment will enable Sight to substantially expanditsU.S. footprint.

$50M: Series B Extensionfor Enzymatic DNA Synthesis

DNA Script, Paris,announced a $50 million extension to its Series B financing, bringing the total investment of this round to $89 million. This oversubscribed round is led byCasdinCapital and joined by Danaher Life Sciences, Agilent Technologies, MerckKGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, through its corporate venture arm, M Ventures three of the world's leaders in oligo synthesis LSP, theBpifranceLarge Venture Fund and Illumina Ventures. Funding from this investment round will enable DNA Script to accelerate the development of its suite of enzymatic DNA synthesis (EDS) technologies in particular, to support the commercial launch of the company's SYNTAX DNA benchtop printer.

$25M: Series A for Targeted Exosome Vehicles

Mantra Bio, San Francisco, has raised $25 million in a Series A financing to advance development of next generation, precision therapeutics based on its proprietary platform forengineering Targeted Exosome Vehicles (TEVs). 8VC and Viking Global Investors led the round, which also included Box Group and Allen & Company LLC. Mantra Bios REVEAL is an automated high throughput platform that rapidly designs, tests and optimizes TEVs for specific therapeutic applications. The platform integrates computational approaches, wet biology, and robotics, to leverage the diversity of exosomes and enable the rational design of therapeutics directed at a wide range of tissue and cellular targets.

$23.7M: Shared Grant for Biologically Based Polymers

The National Science Foundation has named the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Santa Barbara, partners in a collaboration calledBioPACIFICMIPforBioPolymers, Automated Cellular Infrastructure, Flow, and Integrated Chemistry: Materials Innovation Platformand has funded the effort with a five-year, $23.7 million grant. The initiative is part of the NSF Materials Innovation Platforms program, and its scientific methodology reflects the broad goals of the federal governments Materials Genome Initiative, which aims to develop new materials twice as fast at a fraction of the cost. The collaboration aims to advance the use of microbes for sustainable production of new plastics.

$17M: Series A to Scale At-Home Blood Collection

Tasso, Seattle,secured a $17 million Series A financing round led by HambrechtDuceraGrowth Ventures and includedForesiteCapital, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Vertical Venture Partners,Techstars, and Cedars-Sinai. The company will use the proceeds to scale manufacturing and operations to meet the increased demand for its line of innovative Tasso OnDemand devices, which enable people to collect their own blood using a virtually painless process from anywhere at any time. These fast and easy-to-use products are being adopted by leading academic medical institutions, government agencies, comprehensive cancer centers, and pharmaceutical organizations around the world.

$12M: Molecular Data, AI Build Therapeutic Models

Endpoint Health, Palo Alto, Calif.,emerged from stealth mode in mid-July with $12 million in debt and equity financing led by Mayfield to make targeted therapies for patients with critical illnesses including sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Endpoint Health is led by an experienced executive team including the co-founders ofGeneWEAVE, an infection detection and therapy guidance company that was acquired by Roche in 2015. Endpoint Healths approach combines molecular and digital patient data with AI to create comprehensive therapeutic modelstools that identify distinct patient subgroups and treatmentpatterns in order to highlight unmet therapeutic needs. These models are used to identify late-stage and on-market therapies, often created for other indications, that Endpoint can developinto targeted therapies, which will include the required tests and software to guide their use.

$12M: Start of an NIH Contract For COVID-19 Microfluidics

FluidigmCorporation, South San Francisco, Calif.,announced execution of a letter contract with the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, for a proposed project under the agencys Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program. The project, with a total proposed budget of up to $37 million, contemplates expandingproduction capacity and throughput capabilities for COVID-19 testing withFluidigmmicrofluidics technology. The letter contract providesFluidigmwith access to up to $12 million of initial funding based on completion and delivery of certain validation milestones prior to execution of the definitive contract.A goal of theRADxinitiative is to enable approximately 6 million daily tests in the United States by December 2020.

$6.5M: Series A for AI-Powered Precision Oncology

Nucleai,Tel Aviv,a computational biology company providing an AI-powered precision oncology platform for research and treatment decisions, secured $6.5M Series A initial closing.Debiopharmsstrategic corporate venture capital fund led the round joined by existing investors: Vertex Ventures and Grove Ventures.Nucleaiscore technology analyzes large and unique datasets of tissue images using computer vision and machine learning methods to model the spatial characteristics of both the tumor and the patients immune system, creating unique signatures that are predictive of patient response.

$5M: Pharma Grant for Rural Lung Cancer

Stand UpToCancer, New York,received a new $5 million grant from Bristol Myers Squibb to fund research and education efforts aimed at achieving health equity for underserved lung cancer patients, including Black people and people living in rural communities. The research efforts funded by the three-year grant will consist of supplemental grants to current Stand UpToCancer research teams. The supplemental grants will focus on identifying new and innovative diagnostic and treatment methods for lung cancer patients in need. These supplemental grants will be designed to jumpstart pilot projects at the intersection of lung cancers, health disparities and rural healthcare, for instance increasing clinical trial enrollment among historically under-represented groups. Since 2014, Bristol Myers Squibb has provided funding for important Stand UpToCancer research initiatives.

$2.5M: Cloud-Based XR Platform

Grid Raster, Mountain View, Calif., secured $2.5 million led byBlackhornVentures with participation from other existing investorsMaCVenture Capital andExfinityVenture Partners. This infusion of additional capital enables Grid Raster to continue developing its XR solutions, powered by cloud-based remote rendering and 3D vision-based AI, in key customer markets that include Aerospace, Defense, Automotive and Telecommunications.

$1.5M: SBIR for Acute Pancreatitis

Lamassu Pharma has received $1.5 million in Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This will be used for further development of its lead therapeutic compound, RABI-767, a novel small molecule lipase inhibitor licensed from the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. Lamassu is developing RABI-767 to fill a critical, unmet clinical need for a treatment for acute pancreatitis (AP). Lamassu's proposed treatment is designed to mitigate the systemic toxicity and organ failure associated with acute pancreatitis that causes lengthy hospitalization, organ failure, and death, thus saving both lives and healthcare system resources. Funding from the NIH will enable Lamassu tofurther its translational research, to bring RABI-767 to human trials, and to partner with clinical and commercial development partners.

$800K: Protein Interaction Platform

A-Alpha Bio, Seattle,has been awarded an $800,000 grant to optimize therapeutics for infectious diseases. Awarded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the grant work will be carried out by A-Alpha Bio in partnership with Lumen Bioscience using machine learning models built from data generated by A-Alpha Bios proprietaryAlphaSeqplatform. A-Alpha Bio has already completed a pilot study in partnership with Lumen Biosciences and supported by the Gates Foundation. This pilot study successfully demonstrated theAlphaSeqplatforms ability to characterize binding of therapeutic antibodies against multiple pathogen strains simultaneously. With the latest grant, the companies will useAlphaSeqdata to train machine learning models for the development of potent and cross-reactive therapeutics against intestinal and respiratory pathogens.

$620K: Grant for Gas-Sensing Ingestible

AtmoBiosciences, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia,has been awarded a $620,000 Australian Government grant through theBioMedTechHorizons (BMTH) program.Atmoaddresses the unmet clinical need to interrogate and monitor the function of the gut microbiota, allowing better diagnosis and development of personalized therapies for gastrointestinal disorders, resulting in earlier and more successful relief of symptoms, and reduced healthcare costs.Atmosplatform is underpinned by theAtmoGas Capsule, a world-first ingestible gas-sensing capsule that senses clinically important gaseous biomarkers produced by the microbiome in the gastrointestinal system. This data is wirelessly transmitted to the cloud for aggregation and analysis.

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Follow the Money: Cash for AI Models, Oncology, Hematology Therapies - Bio-IT World