Welcoming Bioelectronica to the Rising Tide Portfolio!

Digitalizing drug discovery and diagnostics

• Bioelectronica is a research-stage biotechnology company building intelligent, digital tools for drug discovery, diagnostics and cell sorting
• Bioelectronica is a seasoned team of world-class technical talent in the areas of systems engineering, cell biology, and wet-chemistry, with a long history of working together to create value for shareholders
• After successfully using electronics to measure single molecules of DNA in a high throughput next gen sequencing system (at a biotech startup acquired by a Big Pharma corporation), founder Roger Chen started Bioelectronica to engineer single-cell and protein detection

Introduction:
Despite cheap, abundant genetic information, healthcare research is still constrained and complex. While the cost of DNA sequencing is declining, personalized medicine, drug research and diagnostics are now limited by sample throughput and collecting orthogonal data sets, which must be ultimately merged, introducing biases. Assays for different biomarkers (nucleic acids vs. proteins vs. cells, etc.) require different instrumentation, which is costly for labs. Bioelectronica’s platform is at the intersection of digital assays and multivariate index assays. A digital assay is one in which the sample is partitioned into many small containers such that each partition contains a discrete number of biological entities (0, 1, 2, 3, …).

A powerful technique in the biologist's toolkit, digital assays bring a new level of precision in quantifying nucleic acids, measuring proteins and their enzymatic activity, and probing single-cell genotypes and phenotypes. A multivariate index assay combines the values of multiple variables using an interpretation function to yield a single, patient-specific result (e.g., a “classification,” “score,” “index,” etc.), that is intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease, and provides a result whose derivation is non-transparent and cannot be independently derived or verified by the end user.

Bioelectronica has developed a platform for digital multivariate assays, which combine the values of multiple variables using an interpretation function to yield a single, patient-specific result, that is intended for use in the diagnosis of disease. Single variate analyses limit clinicians to rely on single-marker instruments to analyze one component of a sample at a time, which is costly for patients, payers and providers. Bioelectronica’s high-throughput digital biochemistry platform enables the tracking of multivariate data simultaneously, in a low-cost and disposable chip.

Bioelectronica’s chips are backed by two patent-pending technologies: (i) an electronic sensing technology (not dependent on optical sensing), and (ii) a novel lensless optical system that integrates with computer vision. The detectors are built and integrated with low-cost components from the high-tech supply chain, and allow data to be processed in the cloud. The benefits of Bioelectronica’s platform are that it combines the functionality of many analytical instruments, is cost-effective, provides cloud-based analytics, and is high throughput. Combined, these allow Bioelectronica to generate large and complex molecular-and cellular-level biochemical data sets that can be aggregated into “digital signatures” and further used for specific diagnostics across a range of research fields.

Differential Advantage
Bioelectronica’s main differential advantage will be its ability to multiplex assays across proteins, antibodies, cells, and nucleic acids, all within the same chip at the same time.Removing the need for different instrumentation for different assays allows for democratization of the diagnostic platform to remote and underdeveloped regions of the world. Running all assays on a single chip also improves the quality of the dataset as having to merge distinct datasets invariably introduces biases and potentially confounding variables. The quality of this data and the uniqueness of the electronic signatures created, will entice pharma partners to develop and commercialize on the platform.