Life sciences firm Congenica has raised £1m ($1.56m) in seed funding from Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge University’s venture fund, to further develop its genetic disease diagnosis technologies.
Based in the university’s tech cluster, Congenica is a spin-out of charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust and is commercialising work undertaken by the charity’s Sanger Institute. Its platform, dubbed Sapientia, allows for diagnosis in children of both common and rare genetic diseases using a process that takes minutes rather than years.
Tom Weaver, CEO of Congenica, said that the technology will end the “patient odyssey” where families make constant trips to clinic in order to find a diagnosis, adding: “There are about 7,000 rare diseases that affect more than 75M people in Europe and North America alone. Only 3,200 genes have so far been associated with these rare disorders. Some of these conditions are extremely rare making them very difficult to diagnose, currently requiring lengthy and expensive genetic testing.”
