TheraGenetics raises $6M for personalized medicine

July 10, 2007 | David P. Hamilton | Comments | |

TheraGenetics, a London biotechnology company developing personalized-medicine diagnostics, raised $6 million (£3 million) in a first funding round. The company is working on a diagnostic test designed to predict which patients are most likely to respond to antipsychotic drugs, including those for schizophrenia.

Swarraton Partners led the round, joined by Tudor Capital, IP Venture Fund, and IP Group. TheraGenetics was spun out of the King’s College Institute of Psychiatry.

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About the Author, David P. Hamilton

David Hamilton has been writing for VentureBeat LifeScience since April 2007. He formerly spent 14 years as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in its San Francisco and Tokyo bureaus. Prior to that, he spent several years as a reporter at Science Magazine and as a reporter/researcher for the New Republic, both in Washington.

  • One of the interesting aspects of diagnostic tests for prospectively assessing patient response to psychiatric medications is not so much personalized medicine (although this "buzz" word does generate investor interest) but rather that such medications (particularly antipsychotics and antidepressants) have a relatively long lag time (sometimes several weeks) before a response can be observed. Hence, this is more a matter of accelerating the treatment effect which improves clinical efficacy, patient convenience and also optimizes physician/clinical resources. In my mind, these are probably the most significant benefits to such technology.

    Another way of putting it is that this TheraGenetics technology promises to improve the operational efficiency of the treatment rather than any particular "personalization" per se.

    For more on personalized medicine see the Life Sciences Daily blog at:

    http://blog.aesisgroup.com/categories/Personali...

    Ogan