Meiogenix announces $13 million series A financing round led by Sofinnova Partners

Meiogenix is a biotech company developing breeding technologies to unlock the unexplored genetic diversity of organisms. Meiogenix expands the natural biodiversity and helps developing new products to address global food and industrial challenges.

Meiogenix launched in 2011 as a spin-off of the Institut Curie and the French Agricultural Agency INRA and raised a first round of venture funds. Meiogenix’s main technology is the brainchild of Dr. Alain Nicolas, a scientist at the Institut Curie who discovered a method to increase the frequency of meiotic recombination in cold regions of the genome. Dr. Alain Nicolas fused Spo11, the endonuclease responsible for initiating the meiotic recombination, to a DNA binding domain and demonstrated that Spo11 increases the recombination frequency in genomic regions recognized by the DNA recognition factor.

Meiogenix is currently applying its technologies through different R&D programs in plants and industrial yeast, and is developing complementary breakthrough technologies to control meiosis and recombination.