Tuesday, December 13, 2011

PathoGenetix snags Sagentia to make sequencing device

By Rodney H. Brown

Woburn’s PathoGenetix Inc. has picked Sagentia Inc., a U.K.-based company that has its U.S. headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., to make a rapid microbe detector based on PathoGenetix’s technology.

The Genome Sequence Scanning technology from PathoGenetix will be at the heart of the commercial-scale system being developed by Sagentia, the two companies said in a release. The goal is to create a system that could not only be used in microbial research, but also in food and product safety and in testing for diseases in the clinic.

PathoGenetix has a laboratory prototype it has developed based on the GSS technology, which “extracts genomic barcodes from microbial DNA as it flows through a microfluidic chip at 150 million base pairs per second,” the release noted.

Sagentia was chosen to make it a commercial product, both enhancing the usability of the prototype and making it easier and more efficient to manufacture.

Sagentia, based in Cambridge, U.K., opened its Cambridge, Mass., operations in November of 2010. In June 2011, the company reported it had expanded locally, with plans to add 25 new employees over 18 months.
 
Last month, PathoGenetix added $7.5 million to round out its Series B financing, which it started in August with a $4 million tranche. The second tranche of the investment added new backer Ascension Health Ventures to the list of three return investors – Excel Venture Management, CB Health Ventures and HealthCare Ventures.

The company was known as U.S. Genomics until November 2010, when it changed the name to PathoGenetix and raised $1.3 million in an equity offering and converted $900,000 in debt.