Deep Genomics, a Canadian biotech company, closed a $180 million Series C funding round led by Softbank, with investments from CPPIB, Fidelity, and others. The company, supported by Amplitude Ventures, uses AI to revolutionize drug discovery, focusing on RNA therapeutics. The funding will expand their AI workbench and pipeline, aiming to advance four programs into the clinic by 2023.

Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page"*" indicates required fields Precision medicine is a kind of treatment strategy that is tailored to individual patients, most of which is dependent on their genetic makeup. Genomics, which deals with the mapping of genomes, is a booming industry that aims to advance precision medicine to address a host of diseases. You may have heard of the big names in the business, like Illumina, Oxford Nanopore Technology, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. But there are a number of genomics startups that have sprouted up in the past decade or so to strengthen their sequencing technologies to aid in disease prevention and treatment. Here are seven genome sequencing startups that are making their mark in the industry.Element BiosciencesFounded in 2017, Element Biosciences shot to fame fairly quickly after the launch of its lab services. Its benchtop sequencing instrument AVITI has a dual flow cell layout and individually addressable lanes and you can perform two parallel runs and operate each side independently. Its alternative model, AVITI LT, is a lower-cost, lower-throughput solution that brings next-generation sequencing (NGS) to more labs.The core components of Element’s sequencing tool include an Avidite base chemistry, which circularizes, copies, and rolls each strand into tightly bound polonies – tiny clusters of identical DNA molecules – without the use of PCR and fluorescent avidites that bind to each polony creating ultrastable complexes. It also employs rolling circle amplification, which is a process that uses a circular DNA template to create long single-stranded DNA molecules to avoid errors such as index hopping – when sequencing reads are incorrectly assigned to the wrong sample in a pool. Its sought-after technology is called LoopSeq, which prepares libraries for long-read sequencing on the short-read Element AVITI System