NEW YORK – Cancer precision diagnostics startup Pairidex on Monday announced the close of a $4.89 million seed financing round.

The St. Louis, Missouri-based company did not name the investor but said that it is a large, publicly held strategic company, and that the round was oversubscribed.

The firm plans to use the funding to speed up commercialization of FusionMRD, an RNA-based droplet digital PCR blood test for monitoring minimal residual disease in gene fusion-driven blood cancers. The money will also support further clinical studies, commercial expansion, laboratory operations, and continued development of the company’s personalized molecular diagnostics platform.

The lab-developed test, which is patient-specific and initially focused on acute myeloid leukemia, is currently commercially available from the company’s CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited lab. According to Pairidex, it can be used in the approximately 50 percent of patients with AML that is driven by a gene fusion.

“This investment enables us to bring FusionMRD into clinical practice, where we believe it can enable real-time treatment decision-making for patients with fusion-driven blood cancers by providing more sensitive and accurate disease detection with a less invasive test,” Andrew Young, cofounder and CSO of Pairidex, said in a statement.

Originally appeared in Genome Web at: https://www.genomeweb.com/cancer/cancer-mrd-testing-startup-pairidex-raises-49m-seed-financing