Mammoth Biosciences just raised $45 million in Series B funding for their Crispr diagnostics, and they already have several partnerships in the works.
Nick Radford PhotographyCrispr for disease testing, said Thursday that it had raised $45 million in Series B funding to expand into treatments. The round, led by Decheng Capital and including new investor Verily, brings total funding to over $70 million.honorees Trevor Martin, Janice Chen, Lucas Harrington and Crispr pioneer Jennifer Doudna, uses Crispr as a genetic “search engine” to find disease markers and alert researchers of their presence.
The new capital will allow Mammoth to expand into more traditional gene editing, which can be used to. The company also plans to double in size, Martin says. Mammoth has already moved into new lab space on the South San Francisco campus of Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences company. Crispr gene editing emerged in the 2010s as a tool that could quickly and precisely snip, repair or insert genes into DNA, giving rise toincluding eGenesis, Caribou Biosciences and Sherlock Biosciences. Most biotech companies in the gene-editing space use the Crispr system with Cas9, a large protein that can cut DNA. Mammoth focuses on a different one: Cas14. Martin refers to this protein as “nano-Cas,” because it’s smaller and more precise than the popular Cas9 protein.
The technology has big implications for diagnostics, Martin says. One of Mammoth’s current partnerships is with UCSF researcher Charles Chiu, who also sits on Mammoth’s scientific advisory board, to create a rapid diagnostic test for the new coronavirus that has sickened more than 6,100 people globally and killed 132.
Right now, suspected coronavirus samples are shipped to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where it can take six or more hours for the test to complete. The new test will work by taking a sample from a nasal swab, putting it into a tube with the Crispr-Cas system and other chemicals, and then dipping in a color-changing strip of paper to determine whether the test result is positive or negative.
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