A new approach to review the genetic makeup of cancer patients and their tumors could enable customized cancer treatments.
It’s been too hard for scientists to analyze peoples’ genetic data. Figuring out the details behind a genome can take weeks and cost up to $100,000. But GenomOncology, based in Cleveland, Ohio, says its mix of software and algorithms will be able to handle it in less than a day.
Knowing the genetic makeup of a patient and tumor will allow doctors to match up those genetic characteristics with the type of cancer drugs that have been proven to work with them, personalizing better-targeted treatments and increasing the chances that they’ll be effective.
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GenomOncology is on the cusp of launching. It’s started raising money for salaries, software costs and tumor sequencing. It wants to work with biopharmaceutical companies, cancer research groups and academic centers. For biopharmas, the idea is that GenomOncology will help them develop new drugs for personalized treatment of cancer as well as understand why cancer drugs in previous clinical studies worked in certain patients but not others.
Eventually, the company hopes to sell its services to oncologists and help them prescribe better-targeted therapies for their patients.
GenomOncology labels itself as a “genomics-as-a-service” business. It predicts that the key to its success lies in its ability to quickly and accurately analyze data and report it to customers in an easily understood format. It will outsource the sequencing of the data.
“We are able to process billions of sequenced base pairs, which would consume more than 1 million pages to print, into a one-to two-page summary capturing the critical findings for the cancer researcher or clinical oncologist,” GenomOncology stated in documents obtained from the Ohio Department of Development through a public records request.
The company’s approach seems to make sense, given recent trends. When it comes to understanding genomics data, sequencing is “the easy part of the problem,” according to HPCwire. Finding software to make sense of the data — the part of the process at which GenomOncology will come in — is “much more complex and therefore costly.”
The technology behind GenomOncology comes from Manuel Glynias, a respected serial entrepreneur with a background in bioinformatics. Glynias raised $54 million for a Netgenics, which also focused on leveraging technology to process data. That company filed for an IPO in 2000 but later shelved the plans and sold itself to LION Bioscience.
GenomOncology’s technology was developed at another one of Glynias’ previous companies called Lucidyx.
The company’s main investor is Zapis Capital Group, which has also backed healthcare companies Cleveland HeartLab, COMS Interactive and YouBeauty.com. (Glynias didn’t return a call seeking comment and Lee Zapis of Zapis Capital declined comment because the company’s funding round is still open).
The company has raised $1.25 million in equity as part of an anticipated $2 million round, according to a regulatory document.
GenomOncology views its top competitors as genome software companies such as Knome and analytical companies such as GeneKey and Foundation Medicine.
