France-based biotech developer Scipio Bioscience received €1.2m ($1.4m) in seed funding on Tuesday from investors including multi-university venture fund Quadrivium I, managed by Seventure Partners.
The round also included German public-private partnership High-Tech Gründerfonds.
Scipio aims to create test tube preparation technology for single-cell research with ribonucleic acids (RNA). RNA molecules are essential to a person’s genetic code and hold great potential for genomics research, however the cost of sequencing experiments can be prohibitive.
Scipio’s approach would use an automated barcoding kit to identify the test tubes, so researchers need no longer fiddle with manually-positioned barcodes that sometimes fail to read through machines.
Scipio is looking to launch an R&D operation in Germany in 2018 and will seek research samples and user feedback through additional partnerships with Europe-based research institutions.
Scipio’s approach is based on work by Stuart Edelstein, a biophysicist and emeritus professor of University of Geneva who now acts as president of Scipio.
Pierre Walrafen, previously intellectual property and R&D manager for France-based precision medicine developer Genomic Vision, will work alongside Edelstein as chief executive.
Edelstein said: “The costs and constraints of available methods for sample preparation have hampered widespread adoption of single-cell approaches so far.
“We overcome these hurdles by providing a simple kit-based technology, requiring no specific devices, to prepare thousands of cells for profiling studies in a test tube setup.”
Quadrivium I provides seed capital to spinouts from a range of French universities, research institutes and foundations – such as UPMC, Pantheon-Assas University, Paris-Sorbonne University, University of Technology of Compiègne and PSL Research University.
