This is the virus detection specialist's first financing round.
Yozmot Granot Initiative Center incubator company Modules for Novel Diagnostics (MND) Ltd. has closed its first financing round, raising $4.7 million from a group of private investors from Switzerland, headed by the Dreyfus and Merilous families. The two families have also invested in another Yozmot incubator company, Sonenco. The investors said that they believed that MND would receive further investment and Abraham Merilous told "Globes" that his family was looking for further investment opportunities in life sciences and alternative energy companies in Israel.
MND was founded in 2004 by Dr. Dorit Arad, former VP at Exogenics, with the aim of developing a technology that will enable the rapid identification of viruses, including in field conditions. The company claims it can identify viruses within two to ten minutes of sampling them, compared with the three days that is required for this today, and which can be carried out under laboratory conditions only. ,p>Arad says that the rapid test is possible because it does not identify antibodies to the virus or genetic secretions from it, but the living virus itself. "The method was made possible following the maturing of different technologies at this very time, namely the development of methods that are more sensitive to the presence of viral enzymes, developments in bio-informatics that enable immediate detection of a virus' genetic composition, and new methods for deducing the kind of enzyme we're looking for from the genome structure, " Arad added.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on July 30, 2007
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