In addition to making some money, RainDance Technologies has made a new friend: RainDance is closing a $20 million Series E financing round, and Myriad Genetics is now a new strategic equity investor. The two companies earlier this month announced a multi-year commercial supply agreement whereby Myriad has adopted RainDance’s ThunderStorm™ system for targeted sequencing enrichment of Myriad’s Hereditary Cancer Panel. RainDance will be supplying Myriad with ThunderStorm systems, gene panels, consumables, and reagents as part of that deal.

The venture investors in RainDance that participated in the Series E round included Mohr Davidow Ventures, Quaker BioVentures, Alloy Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners, and Sectoral Asset Management. RainDance plans to use the proceeds of this financing to drive global expansion of its products: the ThunderStorm system for targeted next-generation sequencing, and the recently launched RainDrop™ digital PCR system for multiplexed quantitative detection of circulating nucleic acids. In addition, the company says that the financing will enable it to expand its commercial operations and manufacturing capacity, including relocation of the company headquarters to a new facility in mid-2013.

“We are seeing a significant acceleration in customer adoption and commercial growth, and these funds will carry the company through several value inflection milestones in the coming year,” said Roopom Banerjee, president and CEO of RainDance Technologies.

Interest in the ThunderStorm is growing in intensity over several research institutions, including the University College London Cancer Institute (which back in November adopted the ThunderStorm system as a centralized platform for the validation of genomic and epigenomic targets from clinical and nonclinical studies), the LIGAN-Personalized Medicine Equipment of Excellence at the Pasteur Institute of Lille in France (who announced in same month that they would also offer services for target enrichment using the ThunderStorm system in addition to using it for their own research), and CEINGE Biotecnologie Avanzate in Naples, Italy (where researchers are using the system to design panels for researching and discovering novel mutations and genes related to the onset and/or development of specific tumors or inherited human diseases).

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