The funding round, capped at £5 million, is the Company’s largest to date, with a total of £21.3 million raised since 2009.
The team at Base4 is developing a microdroplet based sequencing method that generates long reads from a single molecule of DNA, without the need for initial amplification. As each base is released, it is encapsulated in its own aqueous microdroplet, where it is identified using fluorescence detection. Base4’s proprietary chemistry has demonstrated better than 99.5% per base single pass accuracy and with continued development is targeting even faster, higher signal to noise reactions. It has also demonstrated accurate, direct readout of methylated cytosine, and methylated adenine. No additional sample preparation is needed as the methylation state is read directly, with no bisulfite conversion.
Chromosomal rearrangements and epigenetic modifications are critical elements to understanding and predicting disease states, targeting drugs to individuals and assessing general health. To detect these rearrangements and modifications, long read lengths and direct readout of methylation states are required. Base4 has the only technology capable of doing so at a scale and cost that will enable the testing of large populations. This technology promises to be extremely disruptive, enabling the generation of cheaper, more accurate and much more meaningful sequencing data.