The Burrill Report


DNAnexus, a science technology startup tackling genomics data management, has landed $15 million in a second-round funding led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech, giving it fresh cash for hiring and product development.

With the cost of both sequencing and storage falling, the barriers to creating genomic data are lower than ever. Academic and corporate researchers are amassing enormous amounts of genetic data at a rapid clip, creating a prime opportunity for companies such as DNAnexus. By providing scalable data storage, centralized computing power, and digital visualization tools, the company hopes to play a key role in helping manage the costs and IT challenges of dealing with big genomic data sets.

“We are at a pivotal time in the field of genomics, with data growing exponentially,” says Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus. “In less than five years, the cost of DNA sequencing will be on par with the cost of other routine lab tests, bringing it in reach of almost everyone in the developed world.”

For TGP, there’s “a tremendous opportunity to build an ecosystem for users to manage their genomics data and enable collaboration on a distributed, cloud-based platform,” says Geoff Duyk, a partner at the firm.

In conjunction with the new funding, DNAnexus also says it is teaming up with Google to help maintain access to the most comprehensive archive of publicly available raw sequencing data, the Sequence Read Archive. Parts of the archive are due to be phased out due to funding cuts at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

The companies worked together to create a new and intuitive interface to help researchers quickly identify and browse datasets of interest, then download sequenced genomes for investigation using their own tools.


October 16, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-dnanexus_nails_15m_venture_investment_from_google_and_tpg.html