Quadraspec lands $2.5M investment

Quadraspec Inc. has snagged another $2.5 million in capital that the West Lafayette-based company hopes will carry it to the point of launching its diagnostic products for human use.

Indianapolis-based Clarian Health Ventures led the funding round, contributing more than $625,000. Three other firms also joined in, including Michigan-based EDF Ventures, Carmel-based Spring Mill Venture Fund and South Bend-based 1st Source Capital Corp.

Quadraspec, headquartered at Purdue Research Park, now has raised $22 million since its founding in 2004. It has 46 employees and hopes to grow that total by 50 percent in the next year.

“The latest round really helps us complete some of our core technology development,” said Dick Aderman, Quadraspec’s president and chief operating officer.

Quadraspec sells high-volume diagnostic testing instruments. Its technology allows 272 samples to be deposited on a CD-like disc and analyzed by a reading machine, kind of like a DVD player.

The machines can perform 1,000 tests an hour, compared with other instruments that perform about 300 per hour, Aderman said.

In January, Quadraspec started working with its first customer, Antech Diagnostics, the nation’s largest veterinary testing laboratory. Quadraspec is testing its machines for use on human tissue samples and expects to have a commercialized product for the clinical market by the fourth quarter of 2009, Aderman said.

“We think they’re close to the point of entering the human market,” said Clarian Health Ventures CEO Matt Neff. “A lot of those tests are under way. So we’re cautiously optimistic. It ought to have a pretty broad application.”

Before investing, some of Clarian’s lab scientists tried out Quadraspec’s systems and came up with ideas the company could pursue, Aderman and Neff both said.

It’s the first time Clarian Health Ventures has led a round of venture funding. The Clarian fund started a year ago with $25 million from the investment chest of the Indianapolis-based Clarian Health hospital system, the state’s largest.

Clarian Health Ventures’ two other investments were in Indianapolis-based CS-Keys Inc., which is developing new kinds of cancer diagnostic tools, and Minnesota-based Celleration Inc., which sells a treatment that speeds up healing of open wounds.