DNA sequencing spinout Longas Technologies has been working away from public view since 2015, having secured cash from the Medical Research Commercialisation Fund as well as its own founding team and directors.
Longas Technologies, an Australia-based DNA sequencing technology spinout of University of Technology Sydney (UTS), emerged from stealth yesterday with details on its enhancement technology for next-generation sequencing platforms.
Founded in 2015, Longas Technologies has devised a technology called Morphoseq that enables simulations of large DNA sequencing readouts to be attained from sequencers with otherwise modest throughput capacities.
The technology applies computing algorithms and chemistry data to predict the results of longer-read files, enabling accurate, high-resolution genomic sequencing to be sourced at lower cost.
Longas Technologies was co-founded by its chief scientific officer Aaron Darling, a professor in computational genomics and bioinformatics at the iThree Institute in UTS’s Faculty of Science.
Darling was helped by fellow co-founders Ian Charles, a former director of iThree who has since moved to the UK-based Quadram Institute, and Catherine Burke, an associate member of iThree and a lecturer in UTS’s School of Life Sciences.
Longas Technologies previously received an undisclosed sum at an unspecified date from Medical Research Commercialisation Fund (MRCF), an Australian government-backed vehicle focused on intellectual properties from a number of Australia and New Zealand-based universities and research institutions.
Stephen Thompson, managing director of VC firm Brandon Capital, which oversees MRCF, has been appointed chairman of Longas’s board of directors.
The spinout also previously raised capital from its co-founders and directors, according to the press release.
