Pattern Bioscience Closes $28.7M Series C Financing

Pattern Bioscience closes $28.7 million Series C financing led by Illumina Ventures and Omnimed Capital, with participation from the Antimicrobial Resistance Action Fund and Daleshaw, bringing its total funding raised to date to $68 million.

Pattern is pioneering the use of single-cell microbiology to rapidly diagnose drug-resistant bacterial infections and identify effective treatments. The company will use the new funds to complete the development of its groundbreaking rapid phenotypic test platform for infectious diseases, perform clinical validation studies, and submit the platform and the company’s initial pneumonia test for regulatory review with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Pattern’s novel technology, based on single-cell analysis of microorganisms combined with machine learning, can generate clinically actionable data identifying the causal pathogen and profiling its antibiotic susceptibility in hours — rather than the days required for culture-based tests, the current standard. The company’s first test, which was granted Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA in December 2021, will be for hospitalized patients with pneumonia. In the future, Pattern’s technology will support a full menu of other tests.

“We are grateful for the support from our investors as we strive to revolutionize bacterial testing with our single-cell microbiology platform,” said Nick Arab, co-founder and CEO of Pattern Bioscience. “We believe our technology will significantly impact patient outcomes and help tackle the growing challenge of antibiotic resistance.”

Every year, approximately 1.3 million lives1 and billions of healthcare dollars are lost to drug-resistant bacterial infections, and faster diagnostic tools are urgently needed to help mitigate this crisis by enabling targeted antibiotic treatment. Using standard-of-care culture-based tests, it can take up to four days to secure a definitive diagnosis for a critically ill patient. Studies have shown that such patients with drug-resistant infections are four to seven times more likely to die if there’s even a 24-hour delay in effective antibiotic treatment.

“Pattern Bioscience’s system will rapidly identify the pathogen causing an infection and provide clear guidance about the best antibiotic to treat the patient,” said Nick Naclerio, founding partner of Illumina Ventures. “I am enthusiastic about the impact they will have on patient outcomes and the global antibiotic resistance threat.”