2008 Headlines
BR Ventures Holding Featured in New York Times
February 25, 2008 - BR Ventures has announced that one of its portfolio companies, Pacific Biosciences, recently gave its first public presentation on the company's human genome sequencing technology at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting held in Marco Island, Florida, from February 6-9, 2008. In coordination with the meeting, the company was the subject of two New York Times articles.
PacBio was funded in 2004 by BR Ventures and is currently venture funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Alloy Ventures, Maverick Capital, and others. The company's goal is to develop a single-molecule, real-time (SMRT™) approach for nucleic acid sequencing. This concept was initially developed by Stephen Turner, a graduate student in nanobiotechnology at Cornell, and Dr. Harold G. Craighead, a professor of applied and engineering physics and director of Cornell University's Nanobiotechnology Center. Cornell has been a preeminent world leader in nanotechnology research for more than 25 years, and leads the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network-an integrated partnership of 13 facilities.
In 2005, the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institute of Health established two major grant programs to facilitate the development of technologies that would enable the sequencing of a human genome at significantly less cost than is possible today. Two categories of grants were established: one for the development of technology that promised to enable sequencing of the human genome at a cost of $100,000, and a second category to accomplish the same for less than $1,000. The National Human Genome Research Institute awarded PacBio an Advanced Sequencing Technology Award grant of $6.6 million for development of technology leading to the $1,000 genome, the largest grant of any company applying at any level.
New York Times Coverage:
Working by Eavesdropping on DNA Doing Its Work
Feb. 9, 2008
The Race to Read Genomes on a Shoestring, Relatively Speaking
Feb. 9, 2008
