Lynx Biosciences undertakes funding round

Lynx Biosciences, a Madison-based biotech company, is undertaking a fundraising round for $1 million.

President and founder Chorom Pak says the company upped its initial ask from $350,000 in order to hasten its expansion efforts.

“We wanted to move a little faster. We can grow faster, hire more people, bring more expertise to the team,” Pak told WisBusiness.com. “Given where we are at this stage of our company, we ultimately decided to go with a larger round.”

If the raise is successful, funds will help the company get through its current clinical trials and get started with its next clinical trial in 2018.

She said finding investors is “a matchmaking process” that takes significant time, but added “we are hoping to close out by the end of quarter two, but it might be quarter three by the time it’s all said and done.”

Lynx Bio took part in the Wisconsin Technology Council’s Early Stage Symposium late last year, where Pak and others presented their company ideas with hopes of connecting with potential investors.

Pak hasn’t slowed down since then. She recently traveled to California for the 10th Annual Cooley Medical Technology Growth Conference in late March.

“We came to meet some likeminded people and companies in the area,” Pak said. “It was great; I made a lot of connections I would not have been able to otherwise.”

She is also planning on attending the upcoming Toronto RESI Conference, where early-stage investors are matched with “fundraising CEOs and scientist-entrepreneurs.”

Pak says this will be another great opportunity to set up meetings with other companies and possible investors.

“It should be really cool,” she said.

Lynx Bio now has a completed product prototype, and has finished a retrospective clinical trial phase, which showed its device can identify patients as either clinically responsive or nonresponsive to “a very commonly used blood-cancer drug.”

“So we’re in the middle of our current prospective clinical trial, to prove that it’s more than a correlation, that it’s actually predicting,” she said.

See an earlier story on Lynx Bio: http://wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=383312

–By Alex Moe
WisBusiness.com