Biomarker 'eBay' garners $3M for open-source project

A fledgling Harvard spinout that styles itself as the future "eBay of biomarkers" has raised $3 million, according to a report in MassHighTech. This appears to be the first amount raised by GnuBio, which plans to pool a mountain of biological samples from institutes around the globe into a single, open-source platform.

The company was founded by John Boyce, a veteran of Helicos Biosciences, Harvard professor Dave Weitz and Jessica Tonani, former associate director of product marketing for Affymetrix. Last June Boyce told MassHighTech that the company planned to market a low-cost sequencing device or offer to do the work in-house. But there's a catch.

"After a certain time period has elapsed, you have to give us those samples for our open source database," Boyce told the tech pub. And the database can be mined for new biomarkers.

- here's the story from MassHighTech