Life Sciences Company Seer To Launch Unparalleled Proteomics Platform

Life sciences company, Seer announced it has raised $55 million in Series D equity financing. This comes as the proteomics firm also revealed that it’s pivoting away from being a research-focused company and concentrating on finding new ways to bring proteome into mainstream medicine.

The funding round was led by life science venture capital fund aMoon with participation from funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. as well as all current Seer investors and other new investors. The company plans to use these new funds to develop and commercialize its unparalleled Proteograph proteomics platform for research and clinical applications. Using its Proteograph platform, designed to probe the proteome (the blanket term used to describe for the entire set of protein expressed by a genome, cell, tissue, or organism), the company will be able to offer an innovative insight into disease prevention.

This Series D round comes a year after Seer first raised $36 million and declared its mission— to do for proteomics, the study of proteins and their functions, what next-generation sequencing did for genomics.

The Peninsula company, which was formed by professors at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Omid Farokhzad, M.D., Philip Ma, Ph.D., and Robert Langer, Sc.D, plans to launch its first product in 2021. This will likely be a broad suite of technologies aimed at the early detection of diseases. Seer also plans on doubling its workforce next year, due to an increased focus on research and development in preparation for the product launch.

Seer posits that its innovative technology will be a game-changer for medical researchers, doctors, as well as patients. While most early detection relies on the genetic likelihood of diseases, Seer hopes to detect the signature of diseases due to changes in an individual’s proteome.

“The genomic information gives risk factors, mutations, indication of your risk status — because that’s your genetic profile,” said Omid Farokhzad, Seer's founder and CEO. “But it’s not a good indicator of your dynamic health status. Our genomic information is the same, but our proteomic information is changing. Everyone wants to get to outcome and function, and function is driven by protein.”