UK start-up Genomics raises £35mn for advanced genetic testing

UK start-up Genomics has raised £35mn as it seeks to accelerate the adoption of polygenic risk scores to help people predict and prevent diseases through partnerships with healthcare systems and pharma companies. 

The University of Oxford spinout is pushing genetic testing beyond the search for individual genes, looking at how combinations of genes increase people’s likelihood of developing diseases such as cancer or cardiovascular conditions. 

Testing healthy people for single genes discovers useful health information about 2 per cent of the time, but polygenic risk scores can give helpful advice about 70 per cent of the time, according to the company’s analysis of data from the UK biobank. 

Sir Peter Donnelly, chief executive of Genomics, said the company’s tests, which are based on a cheaper and easier form of genetic sequencing called genotyping, help discover individuals at high risk who are “invisible to the system”. 

For example, he said about 15 to 20 per cent of women in the UK were at high risk for breast cancer because of a combination of genes, and so should be offered mammograms in their 40s, but could not be identified without polygenic risk scoring. 

“Our vision is that in 10 to 15 years time, genetic information will be ubiquitous in healthcare systems,” he said. 

The new round is led by existing US investors F-Prime Capital and Foresite Capital, and includes new investors such as London-based Infinity Investment Partners and US life insurer MassMutual. 

The 10-year-old company has now raised $100mn in total. Donnelly will use this funding to expand its commercial workforce and believes the funds will sustain the company until it is profitable. 

Genomics has also partnered with the UK’s National Health Service on a clinical trial to work out how to integrate its prediction technology into general practitioners’ routine work, which can be tricky because the doctors are often too busy to focus on preventive care.  

The practice is currently limited to a small number of companies, including Illumina and Allelica, and its use is not yet widespread.

The company provides the risk scores to the UK’s Our Future Health project, the country’s largest research programme. 

“In a couple of years time, there’ll be millions of people in the UK who have personalised risk information based on our tools,” said Donnelly.

The pharmaceutical industry is also increasingly interested in the polygenic risk scores, which they can use to discover new targets for drugs, select patients for clinical trials, and expand the use of existing drugs to larger populations. 

Donnelly said the company works with outside data sources such as the UK biobank and Taiwan’s precision medicine initiative, but its most important resource is the internal database it has built to power its predictions.

“We’ve built a very unique resource inside the company, effectively by sucking in 10,000s of different data from 10,000s of different research studies,” he said.

This article has been amended to correct Foresite Capital’s name.