Sherlock Biosciences will develop molecular diagnostics tools co-developed by researchers at Harvard University and Broad Institute, including Crispr inventor Feng Zhang.
US-based biotechnology developer Sherlock Biosciences was launched out of Harvard University yesterday with a total of $35m in financing, including $17.5m in series A funding provided by the Open Philanthropy Project and unnamed investors.
The other $17.5m were supplied in the form of a non-dilutive grant by the Open Philanthropy Project, a non-profit group primarily funded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of social media firm Facebook, and his wife Cari Tuna.
The spinout is reportedly raising additional series A capital, though a target size could not be ascertained.
Sherlock Biosciences will exploit Crispr and synthetic biology to develop molecular diagnostics that are able to produce fast, accurate and inexpensive results for a wide array of needs in virtually any setting.
The spinout is named after one of its two platforms, Sherlock – an acronym for specific high-sensitivity enzymatic reporter unlocking – that identifies specific genetic targets across multiple organisms and sample types using Crispr.
The Sherlock platform was co-developed by researchers at Harvard and Broad Institute, led by Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Zhang serves as chairman of the spinout’s scientific advisory board. He had led the Broad Institute team that patented Crispr in 2014, resulting in Broad and University of California (UC) Berkeley becoming embroiled in a legal battle over claims both had invented the technology.
Sherlock Biosciences is also working on a second platform, Inspectr – an acronym for internal splint-pairing expression cassette translation reaction. The technology was originally known as Drop.
Inspectr relies on synthetic biology to distinguish targets based on a single nucleotide – a building block of DNA and RNA – without requiring lab equipment and at room temperature.
Inspectr is based on work led by James Collins, a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
The two platforms can be used as stand-alone tools or in conjunction with each other to detect and quantify targets without requiring complex instruments.
They are expected to have applications in a wide range of fields, including precision oncology, infection identification, food safety, at-home testing and disease detection in the field.
The researchers released a paper in 2017 describing how they tested the technology to identify mutations that lead to lung cancer, while current partners in the field are testing the Sherlock platform on Lassa fever in Nigeria, dengue fever in Senegal and Zika virus in Honduras.
Sherlock Biosciences will both develop its own products and seek strategic partnerships. It will use the initial funding to advance development programs and design new assays.
Collins said: “Engineering Biology-based tools have broad potential to transform not just the treatment of disease but also how diseases are diagnosed.
“Sherlock Biosciences will make a significant difference in the world by bringing the power of Synthetic Biology and Crispr to diagnostic development.”
The spinout’s nine co-founders also include Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg, two fellows of McGovern Institute at MIT who had considered joining Sherlock full-time but have instead decided to open a joint research lab at MIT and will advise the spinout as required.
Todd Golub, founding core member, chief scientific officer and cancer program director of Broad Institute, is also among the co-founders, as is Deborah Hung, a physician-scientist at Broad Institute and its co-director of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program.
Pardis Sabeti, a professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and David Walt, the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School, are also among the co-founders.
The academic researchers were joined by Rahul Dhanda as president and chief executive. Dhanda previously acted as senior vice-president of corporate development and marketing for biotechnology developer T2 Biosystems from 2008 until 2018.
Walt said: “We founded Sherlock Biosciences to improve health worldwide through the development of disruptive molecular diagnostics. We are delighted to have the support of the Open Philanthropy Project and our investors as we develop Sherlock’s platforms to achieve that goal.
“Existing molecular diagnostic tools are often limited in their effectiveness because they are costly, labour-intensive, and are not mobile. We believe that Sherlock is poised to overcome those challenges by creating tests that are faster, less expensive and easier to use than currently available molecular diagnostics.”
Several of Sherlock’s co-founders are well-established names in the university venturing world.
Walt is also a co-founder of biotechnology company Illumina, which went public in 2000 and currently has a market cap of $46.9bn – and Quanterix, a biomarker analysis technology that went public near the end of 2017 and currently has a market cap of $551m.
Walt co-founded Quanterix while he was at Tufts University, a position he left in 2017 after three decades to join Wyss Institute.
Collins’ work meanwhile has also led to the founding of Synlogic, a biotech spinout of Boston University and MIT.
And some of Zhang’s research has served as the basis of Beam Therapeutics, a biotech spinout from Harvard that emerged out of stealth with $87m in series A funding in May 2018.
Meanwhile, UC Berkeley has also formed its own Crispr-focused spinout, Mammoth Biosciences, which obtained $23m in series A capital in August 2018.
