HOUSTON and SHANGHAI, Jan. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — NuProbe, a genomics and molecular diagnostics company specialized in ultrasensitive sequencing panels, announces the closing of its oversubscribed $42M fundraising. The lead investors for this financing round are BioTrack Capital and Yonghua Capital. The proceeds will be used to expand the commercial team in both the US and China, develop new NGS products, and file for regulatory approval in China for NuProbe’s clinical products.
“NuProbe has made great strides in 2020 in R&D, manufacturing, and commercialization. Furthermore, we have established a fast and efficient management workflow for the 100+ members of our team,” said Yingshuang Chai, co-founder and CEO of NuProbe. “We are very grateful for all of our investors’ support, and look forward to using this capital to accelerate our new product launch and market penetration.”
“NuProbe’s unique NGS technologies and its management’s proven commercial execution position NuProbe to be a leader in precision oncology and reproductive health in the coming years,” says Kevin Chen, founding partner of Biotrack Capital. “My fund and I are very excited to be part of the journey with NuProbe.”
“There is exponentially increasing awareness and demand for non-invasive liquid biopsies,” says Wen Chen, partner of healthcare investment at Yonghua Capital. “NuProbe’s differentiated technology platform allows liquid biopsy to be broadly offered to people of all walks of life, in China, in the US, and across the world.”
In addition to BioTrack Capital and Yonghua Capital who co-led the financing, Taifu Capital, Panlin Capital, Juming Capital, and Tuobang Capital also participated in the investment. BMD China served as financial advisors for this financing round. Additionally, NuProbe’s previous investors Sequoia Capital China, Ruomu Capital, and Serica Partners also co-invested in the deal.
“Sequencing blood plasma samples locally at the hospital is critical to rapid turnaround, in order to inform timely therapeutic decisions for cancer,” said David Walt, a member of NuProbe’s scientific advisory board (SAB) and the scientific co-founder of Illumina. “NuProbe’s allele enrichment technologies enable lower-throughput NGS instruments found in hospital labs to perform such liquid biopsies.”
George Church, another member of NuProbe’s SAB, adds, “Despite the consistently decreasing sequencing costs, many clinical and research sequencing applications such as those involving minimum residual disease (MRD) with tumor fraction of less than 1 part in ten thousand are not currently affordable. NuProbe provides a pathway to ultrasensitive MRD detection by sequencing.”
In the past 12 months, NuProbe has signed a number of partnership and licensing deals with internationally renowned companies in molecular diagnostics and life sciences, including Illumina, Qiagen, Oxford Nanopore, and the Wego Group. NuProbe has begun to partner with pharma companies for clinical research through its Augury™ custom NGS panels. In the reproductive health field in China, NuProbe has built collaborations with most of the top hospitals and is the leader in infertility testing.
“We are very encouraged to see that NuProbe’s products and services are gaining adoption in the United States, in China, and across the world” said David Zhang, co-founder and Head of Innovation of NuProbe. “We look forward to further serving the needs of our clinical and research customers in 2021, and anticipate the release of several new NuProbe products through the year.”
Author / sources: NuProbe / https://www.nuprobe.com/2021/01/nuprobe-closes-42m-fundraising/
