On the heels of Series A, Nomic will join Broad Institute consortium and expand access to platform

Nom­ic is try­ing to de­vel­op the world’s high­est through­put pro­teom­ic plat­form. It will now do so with an­oth­er $17 mil­lion in tow.

The Mon­tre­al-based com­pa­ny an­nounced the clos­ing of its Se­ries A fi­nanc­ing round Wednes­day that was led by Lux Cap­i­tal, One VC and Cas­din Cap­i­tal. The funds will be used to help build the nELISA, a scal­able form of ELISA — the decades-old tech­nique for de­tect­ing pro­teins in a sam­ple — that us­es ad­vances in DNA nan­otech­nol­o­gy, an imag­ing tech­nique called spec­tral mul­ti­plex­ing, and au­toma­tion to bring a scal­able and gen­er­al­iz­able ap­proach to mul­ti­plexed pro­tein quan­tifi­ca­tion.

It’s all part of an ef­fort to make a more ef­fi­cient and more cost-ef­fec­tive pro­teom­ic plat­form. Pro­teomics is the large-scale study of the en­tire set of pro­teins in a liv­ing or­gan­ism, ei­ther pro­duced or mod­i­fied by an or­gan­ism or sys­tem. VCs and large com­pa­nies are now pour­ing mil­lions in­to the field, bet­ting that it can help drug­mak­ers look at cells in un­prece­dent­ed de­tail and de­sign drugs ac­cord­ing­ly. ‘It’s ev­i­dent that the next leap in un­der­stand­ing and treat­ing dis­ease will come from build­ing atop the emerg­ing om­ic-stack,’ said Lux Cap­i­tal part­ner Zavain Dar in a press re­lease. ‘What’s been sore­ly lack­ing is the abil­i­ty to an­a­lyze the pro­teome as eas­i­ly as the genome, and the Lux team is con­fi­dent that Nom­ic has tak­en the right ap­proach in tack­ling that chal­lenge.’

Nom­ic has at­tract­ed in­ter­est from oth­er groups try­ing to bring greater au­toma­tion for drug dis­cov­ery. In the past, the com­pa­ny has worked with GSK, among oth­er mid-size and large phar­mas.

The com­pa­ny will grow its teams in Mon­tre­al and Boston, ex­pand­ing ac­cess to the plat­form by in­creas­ing its pro­fil­ing ca­pac­i­ty to 100,000 sam­ples a quar­ter by Q2 of next year, scale the nELISA to 500 on-board­ed pro­teins, and be­gin de­vel­op­ment of new modal­i­ties such as the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of post-trans­la­tion­al mod­i­fi­ca­tion.

It will al­so pro­vide the nELISA to the Broad In­sti­tute of MIT and Har­vard’s JUMP-Cell Paint­ing Con­sor­tium. The pro­gram brings to­geth­er phar­mas and biotechs and non-prof­it part­ners to cre­ate the world’s largest pub­lic cell-imag­ing data­base to ac­cel­er­ate phe­no­typ­ic drug dis­cov­ery. The data­base is set to be avail­able next No­vem­ber, and will dis­play the phe­no­types of more than 1 bil­lion cells.

‘We’re hap­py to see the con­sor­tium sci­en­tist aisles ex­cit­ed to ex­plore how syn­er­gis­tic the nELISA and the cell-paint­ing tools are,’ CEO Mi­lad Dagher said in an in­ter­view with End­points News Mon­day. ‘To­geth­er, be­cause as a part of the col­lab­o­ra­tion, Nom­ic will pro­vide the abil­i­ty to mea­sure 200 pro­teins and 10,000 sam­ples which will gen­er­ate 2 mil­lion da­ta points in high-through­put man­ner. We’re very ex­cit­ed about this, be­cause we think it will en­able the sci­en­tists to ex­plore more of the bi­ol­o­gy un­der­ly­ing their com­pound and ge­net­ic screens.’

So far, the com­pa­ny has about 20 em­ploy­ees spread out through North Amer­i­ca. With the Se­ries A, that num­ber will like­ly dou­ble.
https://endpts.com/on-the-heels-of-series-a-nomic-will-join-broad-institute-consortium-and-expand-access-to-platform/