Company name: Spiral Genetics.
Industry: Bioinformatics.
Location: Seattle, Washington.
Solution/product: The business-to-business software platform uses cloud computing for bioinformatics researchers to speed up the process of analyzing DNA to identify different strands linked to cancer and other diseases for more targeted drugs. It also offers a noncloud option called Spiral Cluster. Although it has offered analysis for seven different species including humans, mice, rats, yeast, maize fruit flies and roundworms, its upcoming product will support analysis for virtually any species in the world, according to its AngelList profile.
Money raised: $300,000, but this is the first time the company is raising money. Until now, it has largely been raised through friends and family, according to media reports.
Management team: Adina Mangubat is the CEO and has a bachelor’s of science in psychology with a focus on biopsychology, psychopharmacology and entrepreneurship from the University of Washington. Becky Drees, the chief scientific officer, has done research on genetic interaction maps at the Institute for Systems Biology and expression profiling of lymphocytes for HIV research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute. She holds a bachelor’s of science in biochemistry from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley. Jeremy Bruestle, chief technology officer, has a background in distributed computing. At a previous company, CoCo Communications, he managed the growth of the company from seed to a 50-person development team.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Market size: $6.8 billion by 2017, according to a projection made in a report by Global Industry Analysts.
Competitors: BGI, PerkinElmer and DNA Nexus.
