A Lexington company will use a $15.4 million funding round led by Google Ventures to determine whether a blood test can lead to earlier diagnosis of autism in children.
SynapDx will use the funding to complete a clinical trial of 660 children between the ages of 18 months and 5 years in North America, including youngsters at the Lurie Center for Autism at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital, said Stan Lapidus, the company's CEO.
The purpose of the study is to see if a blood test based on the work of two Children's Hospital scientists — Lou Kunkel and Zak Kohane — can determine children with autism spectrum disorders among a population of kids referred for suspected developmental delay, Lapidus said.
"Our hope," Lapidus said, "is to identify children as early as 18 months" — far earlier than the average age of 4.5 years at which children currently are diagnosed.
Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association, said such a test, if successful, would be "very, very helpful."
"With early diagnosis, you can start treatment sooner," Fournier said, "and the younger you start treatment, the better a child's outcome is going to be."
Since 2006, the federal government has appropriated more than $1 billion for autism research, she said.
But Dr. Krishna Yeshwant, general partmer at Google Ventures, said his company thinks autism research is ripe for a transformation from a behavioral diagnostic approach to a genetic approach.
"Stan and the SynapDx team have approached autism in an incredibly thoughtful way to achieve this transformation," Yeshwant said. "They have assembled the right team, are working deeply with patient groups and have a level of technical sophistication that we haven't seen in the space before."
Foundation Medical Partners also joined the financing as a new investor alongside founding investors North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners,
SynapDx was founded in 2010 and has 18 employees. In February, Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings invested $2 million in the company, followed by a "significant," but undisclosed, investment in March by the Kraft Group, which owns the New England Patriots.
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