WuXi NextCode Raises $200M in Series C Round

WuXi NextCode said today that it has closed a $200 million Series C financing round.
 
The round was led by the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), which contributed $70 million, and included existing shareholders Temasek, Yunfeng Capital, and Sequoia Capital.
 
WuXi NextCode recently acquired Genomics Medicine Ireland (GMI) as part of a $400 million investment initiative for precision medicine in Ireland in which all four of the Series C investors participated. The new funding comes about one year after the Shanghai-based informatics company completed a $240 million Series B round.
 
WuXi NextCode said it will use the proceeds of the Series C round to expand its operations at Dublin-based GMI, whose initiatives include disease biomarker identification and a population genomics study that aims to enroll and sequence the genomes of some 400,000 individuals across Ireland.
 
Last year, WuXi NextCode, GMI, and AbbVie partnered on a project to sequence the genomes of 45,000 Irish volunteers, gather their medical information, and collect the data into a research database.
 
"This phase of our growth has a distinctly Irish focus to it, and we are creating in Ireland the world's premier genome dataset as a uniquely powerful engine both for transforming how we discover new drugs, as well as for bringing new diagnostics, risk screens, and other tools and services to the individual patients," WuXi NextCode CEO Rob Brainin said in a statement.