NEW YORK – Avatamed, a Singapore-based precision medicine company, has completed a $1 million seed funding round led by Future Leading Bio Funds alongside other unnamed investors.
Avatamed said it will use the funds to expand into the Asia-Pacific market and set up a lab in Singapore to provide precision cancer drug screening services.
The company offers a drug screening platform developed through a partnership between Samsung Medical Center; Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR); National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS); and National University of Singapore. The platform uses next-generation sequencing-based genomic analysis, immune profiling, and patient-derived cells and tissues for targeted cancer drug screening and virtual clinical response testing, according to the company's website.
The service enables oncologists to recommend optimal treatments to patients and pharmaceutical companies to determine the efficacy of drugs prior to clinical trials, Avatamed said.
In conjunction with the financing, Avatamed named Pierre Chow, senior consultant at NCCS, Vinay Tergaonkar, research director at the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology Singapore, Jae-Hoon Song, ex-president at Samsung Medical Center, and Chung Joon, president at Solid, to its board of directors.
Last month, Avatamed said it had entered into a public-private, international precision oncology research partnership with Austria's CBmed, South Korea's Aimedbio, Japanese lab instruments firm Shimadzu, and two Austrian academic institutions.