Desktop Genetics bags €1.87M from top UK business angels to change how you manage your CRIPSR experiments

desktop genetics cover

Gene Editing has been made much easier thanks to CRISPR but managing your genome editing workflow can be a challenge. London-based Desktop Genetics wants to solve this problem and just raised additional funding to accelerate its development.

CRISPR is already considered as the biotech revolution of this century. Having an easy tool is one thing, but being able to use it in a good experimental design and in a well-organized informatics system is another challenge.

That’s what Desktop Genetics wants to solve by managing all your genome editing workflow, as illustrated in the figure below.

desktop_genetics_complex

The startup was founded in 2012 by three young scientists from University of Cambridge, who were frustrated in their way of managing gene editing experiments. They raised a first round of half a million euro in 2014, and now, it just announced closing a €1.87 financing round.

Among the investors are really high-class British bioentrepreneurs, including Darrin Disley, Founder & CEO of Horizon Discovery (200-employee Biotech expert in gene editing tools), Jonathan Milner, Deputy Chairman and Founder of Abcam (one of the leading antibody-provider worldwide) and Martin Murphy, CEO of Syncona Partners (the investment arm of the heavily funded Wellcome Trust).

Disley commented: “I am delighted to continue my working relationship with this talented team as they move into the growth phase of the business cycle. It is an exciting time to be in the healthcare sector as the convergence of biology and software promises to have a great impact on human healthcare via application of gene editing in areas such as gene therapy, cell therapy and the development of personalized medicines.”

This investment will allow Desktop Genetics to commercialize its DESKGEN genome editing platform (a costly step for any startups). The bioinformatics venture has already enabled over 4 000 gene editing experiments and counts thousands of users. It also partnered with some high-class companies such as Horizon (not so surprising as Darrin Disley invested), Editas Medicine (one of the leading CRISPR Biotech) and also enEvolv (a leader in engineering microorganism genomes).

This is great news for Desktop Genetics and it should help them on their way of making genome editing easy for every lab around the world.

Bonus: I visited the company last February and it’s a pleasure to see such good news announced. Here’s the video interview of Riley Doyle, CEO of Desktop Genetics:

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