ToloBio Raises ￥10M in A New Round of Financing

According to VCBeat, recently, Nanjing Tolo Biological Technology Co., Ltd. ("ToloBio") announced that it has successfully completed multimillion-yuan financing, which was exclusively invested by BGI Co-win.

 Proceeds from the latest round will be mainly used for the development and registration of in-vitro diagnostic products based on ToloBio’s proprietary HOLMES technology —the underlying methodology of CRISPR diagnostics, the establishment of in-vitro diagnostic GMP production workshops, and the patent application of HOLMES technology in global.

Founded by an academic team from the Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and senior industry personnel from the molecular diagnostic industry, ToloBio provides products and services for genomics research. It offers PCR, cloning vectors and reagents, next-generation sequencing library-related kits, CRISPR/CAS9 reagent, DNase I footprinting assay and DNA/RNA EMSA technologies services and products.

In 2017, ToloBio developed the innovative nucleic acid detection technology based on the CRISPR/Cas12 system, and named it "HOLMES". Compared with the traditional detection in constant temperature, qPCR, NGS molecular diagnostic techniques, HOLMES has the advantage of high sensitivity, specificity and speed, which has also been praised as "the next generation of molecular diagnostic technology" of by the American journal Science, with huge potential application in a broad range of areas, such as the pathogen detection, disease screening, and precision medicine.

ToloBio has the global exclusive patent of nucleic acid detection technology and the application of Cas12 protein. It has also made an agreement with Sherlock Biosciences in the cross-licensing of the underlying CRISPR patents, which is founded by Professor Zhang Feng from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who is one of the pioneers of CRISPR technology, to further perfect the patents of HOLMES technology. At present, the two companies are discussed to deepen their cooperation to expand the application of CRISPR.

Founded in 2016, BGI Co-Win is the corporate venture capital arm of BGI Genomics and is based in Shenzhen, China. The firm seeks to invest in medical technology, gene technology and biomedical companies.