Stanford University has joined the $1.5m seed round of life sciences company Zephyrus Bioscences. The round was led by Life Science Angels and also included Mission Bay Capital and the Angel Forum.
On top of the seed round, the company also secured a $10,000 grant from University of California, Berkeley’s Bakar Fellows Programme as part of its third cohort. It also secured a $350,000 phase I Sbir grant from the US National Institutes of Health.
Zephyrus is a spin-out of Berkeley, commercialising research by Amy Herr which lets researchers study proteins in thousands of single cells. It has dubbed the technology scWestern system, and will use the funding to advance development.
The company’s co-founder and the company’s chief technology officer, Josh Mollo, and the company’s chief business development officer, Gary Zweiger, are both alumni of Stanford, allowing the spin-out to affiliate itself with the StartX Med accelerator and qualify for an investment from the StartX fund.
Kelly Gardner, chief executive and co-founder of Zephyrus, said: “Our vision is to provide the tools to enable researchers to unlock the cell-to-cell variation that drives cancer pathogenesis and stem cell differentiation. We believe that this technology will fundamentally transform how researchers think about cancer and other diseases.”
