Date: 2011-01-18
Type of information: Fundraising
Company: Diagnoplex (Switzerland)
Investors: Debiopharm Group (Switzerland)
Novartis Venture Fund (Switzerland)
NeoMed (Switzerland)
Initiative Capital Romandie (Switzerland)
Amount: CHF 10 million (€7.7 million)
Funding type: series A financing round
Planned used: The alliance between Diagnoplex and Debiopharm will support our objective to advance personalised cancer care by bringing our lead product Colox to patients worldwide,” said Stavros Therianos, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and founder of Diagnoplex.Diagnoplex is currently conducting a clinical validation study of its lead product Colox, a non-invasive, blood-based test for the early detection of colon cancer. The study involves nine centres in Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea, and will enrol 1400 individuals. Interim results are anticipated by mid-2011. Early results obtained in a training set of 140 individuals have shown that Colox can even detect adenomatous polyps, which represent the pre-cancerous stage of the disease. Early detection and subsequent intervention by colonoscopy will have an important impact on the prevention of colon cancer, a cancer with a high mortality. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that survival rates improve up to 90% when colorectal cancer is detected early.
Others:
Diagnoplex SA, a developer of molecular diagnostics for colon cancer, has closed a series A financing extension with Debiopharm Group™. Subject to certain milestones, Debiopharm Group™ has committed to invest a substantial amount in the company, half of which upfront. Investors in the CHF 10 million A-round were Novartis Venture Fund, NeoMed, and Initiative Capital Romandie. The Novartis Venture Fund was also a seed investor in the company.
Leveraging its unique and proprietary molecular platform capabilities together with state-of-the-art biostatistical tools, Diagnoplex develops blood-based cancer diagnostic tests. Diagnoplex’s platform, which is based on RT-qPCR allows quantifying up to 60 genes simultaneously. The Diagnoplex approach offers several important competitive advantages. It pairs the high accuracy and reliability of quantitative PCR with the possibility to read out and analyse multi-gene signatures of different cancers. As opposed to microarray platforms, it is easily scalable and can be run in most standard testing laboratories.
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Is general: Yes
