Founded in 2007 with support from Warwick Ventures and the University of Warwick, Base4 Innovation Ltd has just closed a £5 million funding round. The funding round, led by Longwall Ventures, is the company's largest to date with a total of £21.3 million raised since 2009. The funds will be used to expand the current team and increase lab space, facilitating the continued fast-paced development and automation of its technology.

The team at Base4 is developing a microdroplet based sequencing method that generates long reads from a single molecule of DNA, without the need for initial amplification. As each base is released, it is encapsulated in its own aqueous microdroplet, where it is identified using fluorescence detection. Base4’s proprietary chemistry has demonstrated better than 99.5% per base single pass accuracy and with continued development is targeting even faster, higher signal to noise reactions. It has also demonstrated accurate, direct readout of methylated cytosine, and methylated adenine. No additional sample preparation is needed as the methylation state is read directly, with no bisulfite conversion.

Chromosomal rearrangements and epigenetic modifications are critical elements to understanding and predicting disease states, targeting drugs to individuals and assessing general health. To detect these rearrangements and modifications, long read lengths and direct readout of methylation states are required. Base4 has the only technology capable of doing so at a scale and cost that will enable the testing of large populations. This technology promises to be extremely disruptive, enabling the generation of cheaper, more accurate and much more meaningful sequencing data.

About Base4

Base4 is a Cambridge (UK) based biotechnology company, with 32 employees, holding 8 granted patents. The company benefits from the expertise of a significant number of PhD scientists, with backgrounds across physics, nanofabrication, optical detection, chemistry, molecular biology, microfluidics, electrochemistry and data science. This multidisciplinary team provides the creative solutions needed to overcome the challenges of this exciting field.