Biotech's six million dollar woman

A young biotech that is developing technology to improve racehorse performance is easily outpacing the field when it comes to attracting development funding.

Brisbane's Genetraks, incorporated just 24 months ago, has attracted more than $8 million in venture capital and grant funding.

Of that, more than $1 million has come as grants, including contributions from the START and Biotech Innovation Fund programs.

Venture capital sources have poured another $7 million into the young company, which was co-founded by Roslyn Brandon and Richard Brandon, who are both veterinary PhD's and CFO Stefan Hendriks.

The VC input includes a first-round of $500,000 plus interim funding of $650,000 and a $6 million second-round which has just been successfully concluded.

The main fund managers involved with the company are St George Innovation Fund, Technology Venture Partners and Foundation Capital.

Genetraks CEO Rosalyn Brandon said the company had been pursuing second-round funding for about seven months.

Negotiating terms for the funding was "relatively easy", Brandon says. "The difficult part was in getting investors up to speed (with Genetraks' technology) so they felt comfortable with the knowledge they had about the risk involved."

The commercial potential of its technology for assessing the health of racehorses with a view to maximising their performance has helped Genetraks snare investor interest in a difficult market.

"This has nothing to do with the blood lines or the parentage of the horse," says Brandon. Basically, what Genetraks believes it can develop is a more powerful and sophisticated diagnostic tool than anything now available to owners and trainers of racing animals.

The company is building a massive database which enables correlation of gene expression data with demographic, clinical, pathological and historical data.

Though it is initially targeting the horse racing industry, Genetraks' pending patents on the technology cover its application to greyhounds and human athletes as well.

Using alliances with key equine research groups around the world, Genetraks has amassed a pool of blood samples which it has drawn on to create an equine cDNA library. It has isolated and sequenced genes from the library and is currently translating them onto Affymetrix gene expression chips.

The results of its efforts are intended to produce tools which allow much more sophisticated monitoring of an animal's condition than do current blood tests.

"Horses often have conditions which impair their performance but no current tests are sensitive enough to pick these up at an early stage," says Brandon.

The tools and services Genetraks hopes to have market-ready within two years will give definitive diagnoses of problems much earlier than is now possible, she says.

The company has a staff of six full time equivalents and its latest funding round is earmarked for developing Genetraks' diagnostic and monitoring services technology over the next 18 months.