PierianDx will commercialise diagnostic tools for personalised medicine.
Washington University is spinning out PierianDx, set up to commercialise research in genomic technology that will offer diagnostic tools for personalised medicine. The genomic technology is based on research by geneticists and medical practitioners at the St Louis institution.
The spin-out will commercialise the technology as part of a system – dubbed Clinical Genomicist Workstation – developed in the medical labs at the university. That system has been used at Washington since 2011, and sequences a patient’s DNA to determine a personalised course of treatment.
The system combines high-throughput genomic sequencing with analytic software, and can access bio-informatic databases, all while integrating with a patient’s electronic medical records. This high-throughput sequencing let medical staff know the precise order of the organic molecules in DNA that make up a person’s genome. Knowing this individual genome will allow identification of genes and mutations causing disease.
The startup is able to take advantage of the massively dropping cost for genome sequencing over the past few years. As of January 2014, sequencing one human genome costs about $4,000 – down from $21,000 in 2011 and $3m in 2008.
The company will make the workstation available to clinical labs requiring an in-house solution, rather than relying on an outside service.
Ted Briscoe, chief executive at PierianDx, said: “We are offering a soup-to-nuts process for diagnostic genetic testing. Our core business is providing key bio-informatics software, cloud storage and a seamless process. We can also help labs with assay validation consulting, sequencing services, and support signing out reports, if needed.”