Navigator Technology Ventures announces investment in HistoRx, Inc.

November 3, 2004

Cambridge, MA Navigator Technology Ventures (NTV) announced today the closing of a $1.5 Million Series A investment in HistoRx, Inc., a bioscience company focused on the development of new in situ digital diagnostic technologies. Navigator has led and participated in this financing alongside Genentech, Inc., Sachem Ventures, and Marnet Investments.

HistoRx is commercializing a proprietary new molecular-based imaging technology developed at Yale University for tissue and tissue microarrays called AQUA™ (Automated Quantitative Analysis), which enables researchers to identify relationships between protein expression and therapeutic response that were previously undetectable using conventional methods of pathology analysis. HistoRx has exclusively licensed the AQUA™ technology that was developed by two of the company’s founders, David Rimm, M.D., Ph.D. and Robert Camp, M.D., Ph.D., both of the Yale University School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology. In addition, the company holds exclusive license to a series of patient cohort databases from Yale’s tissue archive containing 20- to 40-year clinical followup information corresponding to different types of human cancer. The Yale School of Medicine’s extensive archive holds more than three million tissue samples collected over the past 70 years. “HistoRx is going to change the way pathology is practiced. It is the first company to work in the area of digital tissue-based proteomics,” says Alain Hanover, Managing Director of Navigator Technology Ventures

NTV, an affiliate of Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, MA and led by Alain Hanover and Rana K. Gupta, is an early-stage, technology venture capital firm that seeks to fund technology rich start-ups. With the assistance of Draper Laboratory, NTV invests in unique, highly proprietary technologies. NTV’s other portfolio companies are Sionex Corp., Polychromix, Inc., Actuality Systems, Inc., Aircuity, Inc., PLEJ, Inc., Polnox Corp., FQS International, Inc., and HistoRx, Inc.

Sachem Ventures, LLC is one of the only student-managed venture capital firms in the United States. Leveraging its assets at the Yale School of Management and outside of the school, Sachem offers portfolio companies the expertise, consulting services, and human capital needed to build successful businesses.

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Nicole Eagon 617 494 0111