Forentis Partners has announced that Forentis Fund, a $50 million special purpose venture fund focused on biotechnology, has committed to provide $7.5 million in funding to Blueprint Bio, Inc., the first of the company's target portfolio companies to receive a funding commitment.

'Our strategy at Forentis is to provide capital resources and support to our group of selected target portfolio companies,' stated Jay Goth, managing partner at Forentis. 'This capital infusion will allow Blueprint to further develop their intellectual property portfolio and fund additional discoveries. As the commercialization engine of our ecosystem, Blueprint will be the first in line for funding.'

Blueprint Bio was founded in 2015 to generate and transform intellectual property into commercial and social value, fulfilling the personalized medicine model. By identifying, protecting and offering new biological discoveries to existing clinical, pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, Blueprint is creating a validated marketplace for biomarker signatures in personalized medicine.

In order to de-risk and accelerate their biomarker discovery, Blueprint is actively collaborating with the researchers and companies who are generating biologic patient data from omics devices such as mass spectrometers and gene sequencing machines, among other assay methods, at an unprecedented rate. Blueprint is based in California, with additional offices at the University of Pennsylvania and the Mayo Clinic.

The company is a co-founder of BluePen Biomarkers, a recently announced initiative to conduct biomarker research and discovery. BluePen is creating a comprehensive biomarker measurement and discovery pipeline for the acceleration of personalized medicine. The company was recently profiled in Future Science magazine.

'Blueprint was created to become a commercialization engine for precision medicine solutions,' stated Matthew Nunez, CEO of both Blueprint Bio and BluePen Biomarkers. 'Through BluePen Biomarkers, we will have access to a wide array of new biological discoveries through our unique multi-omics platform. Our job at Blueprint is to take these discoveries to market as rapidly and efficiently as possible. We have a number of projects already in the pipeline.'

Blueprint Bio has filed patent applications in a variety of drug response solutions and oncology focused diagnostics, further building investor value and pushing forward in its mission to help patients through best in class biomarker based products through its commercialization pipeline.

About Forentis Fund

Forentis Fund is in the business of saving lives and returning reason to the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries. The fund is strategically located at the Murrieta Innovation Center in Murrieta, California, providing it with access to the leading biotechnology research centers of Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County. The fund is within easy driving distance of UCSD, UCR, UCI, UCLA and USC. Forentis Fund is available only to accredited investors. More information on the fund and its investment approach can be found at www.forentis.com.