Synthetic biology startup D-Nome raises $1.5 million in funding from Ankur Capital, Campus Fund

D-Nome intends to democratise molecular diagnostics with their deviceless PCR tech.

Started in July 2021 by PhD students – Divya Sriram and Sujoy Deb – from Telanaga-based The Centre of Cellular and Molecular Biology, the startup’s focus is to build rapid point-of-care diagnostics for human infectious diseases and other applications using genomics and synthetic biology.

“Our mission is to fill the gap in testing and enable personalised medicine at scale, something that has not been successful due to the lack of scalable and accurate diagnostic tools. We hope to create significant impact socially and economically for developing nations and pave the way for next-generation healthcare relying heavily on genomics,”

Currently, there are three main methods of testing – routine culture which is time consuming and requires infrastructure, rapid antigen/ antibody tests which are quicker but lack accuracy, and PCR/ Real time PCR (RT-PCR) tests which is the gold standard for accuracy but is expensive and needs skilled labour.