BioWorld International Correspondent

ZICHRON YA'AKOV, Israel - Rosetta Genomics Ltd. completed its third financing round with $4 million from private investors led by Kadima High Tech, under Yossi Ben-Yosef.

CEO Isaac Bentwich founded the start-up in 2000, his second company. His first company, Pegasus Medical Ltd., was sold to health care informatics giant HBOC (now McKesson Corp.) for $15 million in 1995, acquiring his Smart Medical Record for computerization of medical files. Bentwich's father, Zvi, a renowned immunologist and AIDS researcher, is Rosetta Genomics' chief scientist and chair of the scientific advisory board.

Rosetta Genomics has the world's largest library of sequenced microRNA genes, it said, having discovered more than 100 unique human microRNAs. Those short gene sequences (averaging about 22 nucleotides in length) were considered noise in the genome because they do not code for protein. Recently, they were shown to tune the expression of exons, or target genes, by repressing the translation of their mRNAs into protein.

The company will use the financing to expand its intellectual property protection and to begin animal trials.