Purigen Biosystems

Purigen Biosystems, founded in 2012, operates in the genomics sample preparation market. The company's core technology, Isotachophoresis (ITP), was developed in the laboratory of Stanford University professor Juan G. Santiago. Klint Rose, who earned his PhD at Stanford's Microfluidics Laboratory, is a co-founder of the company. Purigen was established to commercialize this ITP technology, which it licensed exclusively from the university.

The company's business revolves around its flagship product, the Ionic® Purification System. This is an automated, benchtop instrument that uses microfluidic chips to purify and quantify nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) from a diverse range of biological samples. The system is designed for use by clinical and oncology researchers. Its business model involves the sale of the Ionic system along with the necessary microfluidic chip consumables and purification kits. The company has pursued commercial expansion through distribution agreements in the European Union and the UK.

The Ionic Purification System utilizes ITP to separate nucleic acids in a solution based on their electrophoretic mobility, a process that avoids binding to or stripping from physical surfaces like beads. This method results in higher yields and purity, particularly from challenging sample types such as formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues, liquid biopsies, and samples with low cell counts. The fully automated workflow can process up to eight samples in approximately 60 minutes with less than five minutes of hands-on time per sample. The purified nucleic acids are immediately ready for downstream applications like next-generation sequencing (NGS) and PCR.

Since its founding, Purigen has secured significant funding, raising a total of $88.3 million over seven rounds from investors including 5AM Ventures, Roche Venture Fund, and Agilent Technologies. A major milestone occurred on November 28, 2022, when Bionano Genomics acquired Purigen for up to $64 million. The acquisition was intended to integrate Purigen's ITP technology to improve Bionano's own Optical Genome Mapping (OGM) workflow.

Keywords: nucleic acid purification, isotachophoresis, sample preparation, genomics, DNA extraction, RNA purification, FFPE, automated laboratory equipment, microfluidics, Bionano Genomics