Cache DNA, a life sciences company transforming biological sample and data storage infrastructure, announced the closing of its seed round. The team raised an undisclosed amount from notable investors such as Climate Capital Bio, Exor Ventures, Hawktail, LifeX Ventures, Pillar VC, and Trousdale Ventures, including support from Illumina and founders such as Alec Nielsen.
This funding round will help power R&D and support commercial development efforts and key partnerships to bring their solutions to market.
Genetic materials such as DNA and RNA, play a major role in disease biology, therapeutic targeting, and clinical diagnostics. However, growing demands across clinical and research applications challenge laboratories around the globe. Most of the ongoing capital-intensive laboratory infrastructure needed to maintain samples, such as freezers, relies on finite grant funding or falls outside testing reimbursement.
Cache is innovating the sample management infrastructure by preserving precious biomolecules at room temperature, future-proofing samples in a more efficient footprint for discovery and validation. Cache offers a scalable and sustainable system to secure and share multi-omic datasets through its chemistry, hardware, and software, enabling the next generation of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.
After attaining an exclusive license to its intellectual property from MIT, Cache was awarded an SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation. With this pre-seed funding, the team made tremendous progress and moved its operations to the San Francisco Bay Area in less than a year.
Plus, Illumina Accelerator provided Cache with in-kind support, including lab space and access to sequencing capabilities. Cache used these to run extensive concordance analyses and validate its technology using gold-standard genomic reference materials.
Cache is also now partnering with many academic medical centers, commercial labs, and biobanks worldwide. The team recently presented findings from collaboration with the University Health Network on FFPE tumor-derived samples at the American College of Medical Genetics & Genomics (ACMG) and the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) annual meetings.
The company’s founders include CEO Michael Becich, MIT professor, and James Banal (PhD in chemistry at the University of Melbourne). Bathe and Banal co-invented the core technology based on research they conducted while Banal was a postdoctoral scholar in the Bathe lab at MIT. The lab also explores using nucleic acids as programmable nanomaterials. Bathe also co-founded Kano Therapeutics – which is developing a single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) manufacturing platform for gene and cell therapies.
Cache’s CEO is Michael Becich, a Stanford bioengineer and Harvard Business School MS/MBA candidate who worked in bioinformatics, assay development, digital health, and venture capital. While in Boston, Becich and Banal spent several months launching Cache through Nucleate.
The team is also joined by pathology and laboratory medicine industry veteran Heather E. Williams, PhD, Cache’s COO. She is a clinical laboratory geneticist who conducted an ABMGG fellowship at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center and has an executive MBA from Yale SOM.
The company’s scientific advisors include Paul Blainey, George Church, and Jeremiah Johnson, all faculty at MIT or Harvard. The team recently assembled a clinical advisory board with biobanking, sequencing, and bioethics experts.
KEY QUOTES:
“Over the past three decades, sequencing technologies have evolved drastically. It feels like every month, a new sequencing method is developed. With the democratization of sequencing, laboratories are struggling to store and manage a growing number of crucial molecular samples—and their accompanying data—in a compliant manner. As artificial intelligence continues driving the field forward, the need for standards and scalable capabilities in an evolving multi-omic landscape has never been greater.”
– Michael Becich, Cache CEO
“Nucleic acids are the core information carriers of our cells, recording our genetic lineage, developmental histories, and environmental exposures relating to cancer, aging, and inherited disorders. Cache is transforming our ability to harness this information.”
– Mark Bathe, PhD, professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and Cache co-founder
