San Diego-based Edico Genome has received $22 million in Series B financing to staff up and speed adoption of its Dragen genomic data platform. The round was led by new investor Dell Technologies Capital, and included previous investors Qualcomm Ventures, Axon Ventures and NuVasive CEO Greg Lucier.
“We’re going to extend and expand the engineering, sales and marketing teams,” said Pieter van Rooyen, Edico’s president and CEO in a phone interview. “Our focus is to build out the team and grow revenue.”
Dragen is designed around the company’s field programmable gate array (FPGA), a dynamic processor that can be reprogrammed whenever necessary. The company holds nine patents on the technology, which rapidly clarifies genomic data and could make it easier to use genomics to diagnose patients.
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“We take the data that comes off the sequencer, which is about a 180-gig file,” said van Rooyen. “We process and analyze it and the output is around a one gig file, and that contains all the variants associated with a specific patient.”
Dragen’s biggest asset is speed. According to van Rooyen, the platform can process an entire genome in 20 minutes when used from a local server – as little as ten minutes when linked to the Amazon AWS cloud.
Edico is building an impressive array of partnerships to extend the technology – IBM, Intel, Johns Hopkins – and van Rooyen hints there are others in the pipeline. In late 2015, Dragen collaborated with Illumina, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City and Stephen Kingsmore on a groundbreaking study that showed whole genome sequencing could diagnose neonatal intensive care patients in 26 hours. The feat holds the Guinness record for fastest genetic diagnosis.
The company hopes to build on this and other early successes, believing its FPGA technology gives it a distinct edge in both speed and price. Still, there’s no shortage of competition: GenomeCloud, Genalice and DNAnexus are just a few of the companies offering similar services.
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Ultimately, van Rooyen and colleagues are betting the industry will standardize the genomic informatics pipeline, making data sharing more routine, and Edico will have a seat at the table.
“We have a strong IP portfolio, and we’re in the process of becoming the industry standard for precision medicine analytics and data analysis,” said van Rooyen.
