On December 5, 2019 Akoya Biosciences, Inc., The Spatial Biology Company, reported the completion of a $50 million financing from both new and existing investors (Press release, Akoya Biosciences, DEC 5, 2019, View Source [SID1234551974]). The round will fund significant growth through expansion of commercial and operational resources as well as continued product development of Akoya’s CODEX and Phenoptics platforms for spatial biology for research and clinical markets.
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The financing was led by Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking, a division of Piper Jaffray, with continued participation from Telegraph Hill Partners. New strategic partners also include Agilent Technologies and Innovatus Capital Partners, LLC. This financing follows Akoya’s September 2018 Series C funding used to support the acquisition of the Phenoptics Portfolio from PerkinElmer.
Brian McKelligon, Chief Executive Officer of Akoya, will present on Thursday, December 5, 2019 at the Piper Jaffray 31st Annual Healthcare Conference taking place at the Lotte New York Palace, New York. The session will be held in the SoHo Track – Hubbard 1, 5th floor from 2:10-2:30 PM.
"2019 was an exciting year of growth for Akoya, led by new product introductions for both CODEX and Phenoptics platforms," said Mr. McKelligon. "This support from industry leading investors and partners provides the vital endorsement and resources necessary for Akoya to continue to deliver innovative tools to enable a better understanding of the pathophysiology of cancer and provide more informative results for clinical decisions.
Thomas Schnettler, managing director at Piper Jaffray, has joined Akoya’s Board of Directors and commented, "Akoya is transforming how immunotherapies are developed, from discovery of novel biomarkers in the tumor microenvironment, to deploying high throughput, highly sensitive information to direct patient therapies." Schnettler continued, "Our investment represents our confidence in Akoya’s relentless execution to deliver the next generation of pathology tools."
"We are excited to support Akoya’s efforts to commercialize multispectral imaging solutions to unlock the full potential of spatial biology," said Claes Ekstrom, Managing Director at Innovatus.
The new financing will enable further product development of the CODEX and Phenoptics platforms for multiplexed immunofluorescence imaging and analysis, commercial expansion, and the scale up of operations and manufacturing. These expansions are driven by dramatic growth in the immuno-oncology market and mounting evidence that spatial analysis using multiplex immunofluorescence is critical to understanding cancer’s complexity, and potentially provides more power for predicting patient response to immunotherapies.