BioLoomics Closes $600k Pre-Seed Round to Launch Biosensing Drug Discovery Platform

We are excited to announce that on May 30, 2019, BioLoomics closed a $600,000 pre-seed round of funding with private investors to develop and launch our platform technology, and produce libraries of robust biosensor assays to improve the clinical success rate of drug development pipelines. By using single live cells as test tubes, we are actively scaling high throughput screening techniques to approach the vastness of protein chemical space. 

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Dr. Douglas Chapnick, BioLoomics Founder and CEO, was a postdoctoral candidate in the Biochemistry Department in Dr. Xuedong Lui’s lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. For the past five years he has been a key team member in Dr. Will Old’s Rapid Threat Assessment project, funded by DARPA. Within the RTA project, Dr. Chapnick built pipelines to rapidly understand the effects of chemical and biochemical threats on living cells utilizing genetically encoded Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) biosensors to assess each threat’s effect on biochemical pathways. As the RTA project came to a close, Dr. Chapnick formed BioLoomics to apply similar techniques in the pharmaceutical industry, and began generating large libraries of biosensors with pathway specificity and high dynamic range. 

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Jeremy Jacobsen is also joining the BioLoomics team after his tenure in the DARPA Rapid Threat Assessment project. He is a bioinformatics expert and master of mechanical engineering who specializes in large multidimensional datasets and has applied this expertise to proteomics, metabolomics, and microscopy data. Jeremy will immediately begin developing proprietary software and hardware to enable us to select unique biosensors in individual cells.  

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We are setting up our first facility in a space generously offered by Dr. Michael Stowell and the University of Colorado department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. 

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We’re grateful for the support of our early investors, and to the University of Colorado and its accelerator programs, including Venture Partners, and the Lab Venture Challenge.

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