China's Vision Medicals raises $28m

CICC Capital also participated as a new investor. Volcanics Venture and Cash Capital, which provided an undisclosed sum for a Series A last year, re-upped.

Founded in 2018, Vision Medicals focuses on metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), which allows for the identification of bacteria and viruses without a priori knowledge of a specific pathogen from clinical specimens. The company also operates a rapid-diagnosis platform.

The company employs more than 200 people and has accumulated more than 30,000 samples of mNGS data. It has also established more than 5,000 square meters of testing laboratories, R&D centers, and equipment production bases across Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

Lin Wang, founding partner of CDH said the application of mNGS techniques has solved unmet clinical needs, especially in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Vision is recognized as having participated in the earliest detection and sequence identification work for clinical coronavirus samples this year in Wuhan and Shanghai. It has cooperated with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences to release the first batch of genome data for COVID-19 and was one of two companies that helped the Chinese regulator formulate a reference for COVID-19 detection reagents. This led to the development of three detection kits that have obtained EU certifications.

Xu Yi, head of CICC Qichen Fund, describes mNGS is the next blue ocean category in health tech, with potential to replicate previous investment booms in areas such as non-invasive prenatal testing and oncology NGS. He said that as a result of industry experience in these areas, the exploration period for mNGS will be significantly shortened, and industry leaders will be quickly identified.

In the gene sequencing space, MGI Tech, a Chinese manufacturer of gene sequencing devices, has raised more than $1 billion in funding led by IDG Capital and CPE. It is said to be the largest-ever funding round in China's genetics technology space.

 

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Healthcare
• Technology
• China
• CDH Investments Management
• CICC