A group of venture investors are paying $14 million for the assets of deCode Genetics, a bankrupt Icelandic genomics firm offering personalized risk assessments for common diseases. The buyer, Saga Investments, consists of Arch Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. Both backed DeCode in the past. Neither has openly discussed plans for the newly privatized company in detail. But Robert Nelsen, managing director of Arch Venture Partners, expressed excitement about its potential.
 

“I think there’s a critical mass of assets in the diagnostics area and interesting therapeutic insights one can have,” says Robert Nelsen, managing director of Arch Venture Partners. “Part of it is priming. It’s a good time to start to partnerships. I’d call it a reinvigorated commercial focus with the team of Kari Stefansson and Duke Collier.”

 

Collier is a former executive vice president at Genzyme. Stefansson, the former CEO of deCode Genetics, will serve as its executive chairman and president of research.

 

Before the sale to Saga, deCode had considered a number of options for raising funds, including selling some or all of its U.S. medicinal chemistry and structural biology units, granting further licenses to some of its diagnostic products, entering into a collaboration for gene sequencing or selling or licensing some or all of its clinical and pre-clinical drug discovery programs.

 

The publicly traded company, deCode Genetics, has changed its name to DGI Resolution and is navigating bankruptcy court.

 

The private company, which will retain the deCode Genetics name, continues to sell individual calculations of genetic risk for cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack and atrial fibrillation, online for as little as $195, posting results via a private online genome browser. In addition to its personal genetics screening business, deCode also licenses its tests and intellectual property to partners and offers contract services to companies and research institutions.

 

deCode has also has developed a therapeutics portfolio of its own, including DG051 and DG031, late and mid-stage candidates respectively, for the prevention of heart attack. The company has also developed DG041, an anti-platelet compound for the prevention of arterial thrombosis, a condition in which a blood clot forms inside a blood vessel.