Cambridge, UK, 20th September, 2001 - Solexa Ltd, a biotech company developing ultra high throughput DNA sequencing technology, today announced the closing of a £12m ($17m) private equity financing round led by Schroder Ventures Life Sciences.
Schroder Ventures Life Sciences is joined in this investment round by new investors Oxford Bioscience Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners and founding investor, Abingworth Management. The company will use the funding to continue developing its massively parallel single molecule sequencing technologies.
Nick McCooke, President and Managing Director of Solexa, said: "We are delighted to have received this support from such a high calibre investor syndicate. We are now in a strong position to speed development of our novel technology, which has the potential to perform routine measurement of practically all the genetic differences between any individual and a reference sequence."
"Solexa's technology will help to provide a fundamental understanding of the role played by individual genetic variation in disease and drug response," said Dr Timothy Rink, Chairman of the Board at Solexa. "We are delighted to receive the support of additional high quality investors who will add to the strong support and guidance we have received from Abingworth since our founding."
Tom Daniel of Schroder Ventures Life Sciences and Mark Carthy of Oxford Bioscience Partners will join the Solexa Board and represent the new investors from this round of funding.
Tom Daniel, Partner at Schroder Ventures Life Sciences, commented: "Solexa's technology should achieve five orders of magnitude improvement in speed and cost over current sequencing methods. This will enable genome-wide analysis of individual genetic variation on an economic basis, and thereby unlock the vast potential for genetics to improve human healthcare. We are delighted to be backing the company"
Solexa is developing powerful novel technology, which uses very dense arrays of single molecules for massively parallel sequencing. This proprietary technology is based on the inventions of its founding scientists - Drs Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman, faculty members in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Solexa is located south of Cambridge, UK, in customised 12,000 sq ft facilities at Chesterford Research Park. The company has a multidisciplinary team of scientists including 12 PhDs, which is expected to double in the next few months.
For further information contact: Nick McCooke
President and Managing Director
Telephone: +44 (0)1799 532300
Facsimile: +44 (0)1799 532301
Email: info@solexa.co.uk
solexa.co.uk |
