Second Genome has pulled in $42.6 million to expand its Microbiome Discovery Platform. The Series B round, which was co-led by the VC wings of Pfizer ($PFE) and Roche ($RHHBY), will give Second Genome the financial clout to use its computational biology-enabled discovery platform in a growing list of indications.
San Francisco, CA-based Second Genome has established its status as a forerunner in the emerging microbiome sector on the strength of the platform and the candidates it has discovered. The next step in the evolution of the platform, which draws on genomics technologies, computational biology and phenotypic screening to link materials from the microbiome to human disease, is to broaden its therapeutic scope.
Second Genome is keen to apply the discovery platform to indications in which barrier function, insulin sensitivity and immune regulation play a role, an ambition it is now equipped financially to advance. The therapeutic expansion is part of Second Genome’s plans for building out the platform. “This financing will enable us to accelerate our efforts to scale our unique microbiome discovery platform,” Second Genome CEO Peter DiLaura said in a statement.
A growing team will work to realize these objectives. Second Genome is currently recruiting for a few IT-related posts, including a position for a bioinformatician and another for a metagenomics scientist who is versed in machine learning. The job descriptions provide an few insights into how Second Genome is working today and the ways in which it sees its discovery processes evolving as it grapples with how to generate and make use of data.
Key responsibilities for the metagenomic scientist include the application of machine learning to the task of determining feature combinations that can help classify proteins.
- read the release
- and FierceBiotech's take