Congenica has raised £8M in its Series B financing round to sustain the international rollout of its clinical genome analysis platform Sapientia.
Congenica is a genomic diagnostics company in Cambridge’s biotech cluster. Its genome analysis platform, Sapientia, takes on the challenge of interpreting the avalanche of genomic data becoming available in healthcare. The £8M (€9.5M) raised will sustain the release and promotion of its technology internationally, as well as expanding its customer support.
Congenica is a spin-out from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the institution behind the Human Genome Project that mapped the human genome for the first time in 2003. Back then, the challenge was obtaining the genetic information. Nowadays, accurate and scalable analysis of the massive amounts of sequencing data is the main issue.
Sapientia is a genome analysis tool that produces comprehensive diagnostic reports to support the diagnoses of rare genetic diseases. Launched in 2014 and used globally, the technology was selected by Genomics England to interpret data from the 100,000 Genomes Project.
“Rare genetic diseases are relatively uncommon individually but their patients add up to 6-7% of the population,” commented Tom Weaver, CEO of Congenica. “Genome analysis can significantly improve the diagnosis of genetic diseases and reduce expenses for patients and the healthcare system.”
“We’re a spin-out of the UK’s NHS, so we have a good understanding of clinical needs in the public domain,” added Weaver. Sapientia is also being used for personalized medicine by the pharma industry to create disease databases, identify patient populations and support the discovery of biomarkers and drug targets. The Belgian biotech UCB is one of Congenica’s partners in drug discovery programs.
The international expansion of Sapientia will let more and more experts worldwide add and interpret their own genomics data, which in turn will be used by Congenica to improve its services.
Images from Congenica