Cache DNA, Inc., a life sciences company revolutionizing biological sample and data storage infrastructure, today announced the closing of its seed round. The team raised an undisclosed amount from notable investors, including Climate Capital Bio, Exor Ventures, Hawktail, LifeX Ventures, Pillar VC, and Trousdale Ventures, including support from Illumina and founders such as Alec Nielsen. The funds will help power R&D and support commercial development efforts and key partnerships to bring their solutions to market.
“Over the past three decades, sequencing technologies have evolved drastically. It feels like every month, a new sequencing method is developed,” says Michael Becich, Cache CEO. “With the democratization of sequencing, laboratories are struggling to store and manage a growing number of crucial molecular samples—and their accompanying data—in a compliant manner. As artificial intelligence continues driving the field forward, the need for standards and scalable capabilities in an evolving multi-omic landscape has never been greater.”
Genetic materials, like DNA and RNA, play a fundamental role in disease biology, therapeutic targeting, and clinical diagnostics. However, growing demands across clinical and research applications challenge laboratories around the globe. Most of the ongoing capital-intensive laboratory infrastructure needed to maintain samples, such as freezers, relies on finite grant funding or falls outside of testing reimbursement.
Cache is transforming sample management infrastructure by preserving precious biomolecules at room temperature, future-proofing samples in a more efficient footprint for discovery and validation for decades to come. Through its innovative chemistry, hardware, and software, Cache offers a scalable and sustainable system to secure and share multi-omic datasets, enabling the next generation of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.
“Nucleic acids are the core information carriers of our cells, recording our genetic lineage, developmental histories, and environmental exposures relating to cancer, aging, and inherited disorders,” says Mark Bathe, PhD, professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and Cache co-founder. “Cache is transforming our ability to harness this information.”
After securing an exclusive license to their intellectual property from MIT, Cache was awarded an SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation (press release). In less than a year, with this pre-seed funding, the team has made tremendous progress and has moved its operations to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In addition, Illumina Accelerator backed Cache with in-kind support, including lab space and access to sequencing capabilities (press release), which Cache used to run extensive concordance analyses and validate its technology using gold-standard genomic reference materials.
Cache is now partnering with a growing number of academic medical centers, commercial labs, and biobanks worldwide. The team recently presented findings from their collaboration with the University Health Network on FFPE tumor-derived samples at the American College of Medical Genetics & Genomics (ACMG) and the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) annual meetings (article).
Founders and Team
In addition to Becich and Bathe, Cache was co-founded by James Banal, who earned his PhD in chemistry at the University of Melbourne and has received international recognition for his work in biochemistry, solar engineering, and quantum computing.
Bathe and Banal co-invented the core technology, which grew out of research they conducted while Banal was a postdoctoral scholar in the Bathe lab at MIT. The lab explores using nucleic acids as programmable nanomaterials. Bathe also co-founded Kano Therapeutics, which is developing a single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) manufacturing platform for gene and cell therapies.
Cache’s CEO is Michael Becich, a bioengineer from Stanford and MS/MBA candidate from Harvard Business School who has worked in bioinformatics, assay development, digital health, and venture capital. While in Boston, Becich and Banal spent several months launching Cache through Nucleate. The team is joined by pathology and laboratory medicine industry veteran Heather E. Williams, PhD, Cache’s COO. She is a clinical laboratory geneticist who conducted an ABMGG fellowship at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center and has an executive MBA from Yale SOM.
Scientific advisors include Paul Blainey, George Church, and Jeremiah Johnson, all faculty at MIT or Harvard. The team recently assembled a clinical advisory board with experts in biobanking, sequencing, and bioethics.
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