Seven Bridges gets $45M, starts offevolved test Run for most cancers Genomics device
When President Obama introduced the Precision medication Initiative final year ears perked up at Seven Bridges Genomics, one among a variety of startups that helps researchers store, analyze, and interpret big amounts of genomic data. The announcement meant more large-scale genomic knowledge tasks had been on the way for the Cambridge, MA-primarily based startup to battle for. And a $ 45 million sequence A round that the corporate is revealing today will assist Seven Bridges compete for that work.
the money comes from Kryssen Capital, a firm that invests in knowledge-centric startups, and is the primary institutional round Seven Bridges has raised when you consider that its inception in 2009. in keeping with company president James Sietstra, the company funded itself for years on earnings, some debt from Western technology investment, and personal financing, and now has 200 workers in 4 offices around the globe—in Cambridge, San Francisco, Belgrade, and London. Seven Bridges adopted that funding technique because the timing wasn’t proper for a mission investment, he says.
“We basically were taking the lengthy view on the opportunity in biomedical data diagnosis,” Sietstra says. “It’s nonetheless so early that one of the crucial issues we have been sensitive to used to be investor timelines, and investor pressure. So we notion that it used to be finest to find financing strategies that allowed us to attend unless now to lift institutional financing.”
Sietstra (pictured above, proper, with CEO Deniz Kural) wouldn’t be extra specific about the company’s revenues or different monetary knowledge, and declined to assert whether or not Seven Bridges is winning. but a handy guide a rough internet search shows that Seven Bridges has received contracts with the national cancer Institute ($ 5.eight million), Genomics England’s Small business research Initiative (roughly $ 2.9 million), and the national Institutes of well being ($ 4.13 million) since 2014. Sietstra says that Seven Bridges also works with “multiple high 10 pharma” companies and several Boston-house biotechs, but couldn’t disclose which ones because of confidentiality agreements.
That speaks to the rising want for instruments to help retailer, analyze, and interpret genomic data. As the price of sequencing has endured to drop and researchers have learned more and more concerning the underlying molecular causes for various diseases, a bottleneck was once created. particularly, an explosion of genomic knowledge, and no longer enough computing instruments to assist researchers make sense of what they see, share the info from one analysis heart to some other, and make advanced analyses easily reproducible.
Enter a slew of startups, all with various tactics to opening the bottleneck. Cypher Genomics, just got with the aid of Human sturdiness in November, developed software for deciphering genomic information. DNAnexus of Redwood city, CA, has a cloud-primarily based device that effectively outlets large quantities of genomic data and helps researchers arrange and analyze it. Boston-based totally Curoverse manages and maintains what’s referred to as Arvados, an open-supply computational platform that also homes massive amounts of genomic data. (check up on this hyperlink for a list of a number of the companies with cloud-primarily based genomics instruments)
Seven Bridges is part of this crew, too. the corporate’s executives say that their area of interest is an ability to provide these services not for small labs running just a few experiments, but for big firms that want get entry to to an enormous quantity of genomic data—Sietstra referred to as it “million genome scale analysis”—without building the infrastructure for it.
“There are other individuals who provide tool options, however very rarely does that include all the items that a large undertaking must in truth do their work,” says chief advertising officer Andrew Gruen.
massive pharma companies, for example, would possibly want tools for storing and inspecting genomic data amassed through experimental research to assist to find sufferers who would possibly respond easiest to their medication. Seven Bridges charges an upfront annual licensing charge, generally within the $ 50,000 to $ 75,000 vary, for the carrier, Sietstra says.
executive shoppers, meanwhile, may want a cloud-based totally platform to house a considerable amount of knowledge that researchers at different places can faucet into. Seven Bridges, as an example, was certainly one of three teams selected by using the national cancer Institute in 2014 to improve a software platform, the most cancers Genomics Cloud, that properties data from the most cancers Genome Atlas—a more than petabyte-sized catalogue of genomic information from over eleven,000 most cancers sufferers. Seven Bridges is launching a pilot version of the CGC nowadays, that means it’s in an instant available to researchers licensed through the NIH. (the other two groups selected with the aid of the NCI to enhance pilots for the CGC were the extensive Institute of MIT and Harvard, in tandem with UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and Seattle’s Institute for techniques Biology.)
huge-scale genomic information tasks like these, particularly in cancer analysis, are on the upward thrust with the appearance of Obama’s precision drugs plan. Seven Bridges objectives to be a key participant here, which is why it’s ultimately raised a substantial investment spherical. It’s even discovered some political assist for the task—former U.S. Senate Majority chief Tom Daschle has joined its board.
“He’s going to help recommend us as we navigate a few of these White home precision medication tasks and simply better bear in mind easy methods to method the NIH, NCI, and the other departments,” Sietstra says of Daschle. “We’re pumped about that.”
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