UPMC Enterprises, the innovation and commercialization arm of the healthcare giant, led Series B funding in precision medicine initiatives for Omicia, a clinical genome interpretation and reporting software company.
“As an investor, UPMC is excited to work with Omicia to begin to address today’s extraordinary opportunities in precision medicine,” Tal Heppenstall, president of UPMC Enterprises, said in a statement. “We envision a future in which we can routinely deliver actionable genomic insights about individual patients in real-time, within the workflow of our 3,500 physicians.”
Omicia executives plan to extend variations of Omici’s flagship Opal Clinical platform for use in life science research, clinical trial support, population health management and consumer applications.
The software provides fast, accurate and scalable next generation sequence interpretation and reporting capabilities to drive improved clinical outcomes, Omicia executives explain. Also, the technology provides customers with an option to scale production in a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-enabled environment.
UPMC Enterprises participated in Omicia’s $23 million Series B financing round, completed on June 8, along with several other new investors: Roche Venture Fund, LDV Partners, Ping An Ventures, and a large genomics investor, as well as existing investors ARTIS Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners and Buchanan Investments.
Omicia executives plan to use the latest financing to fuel acceleration in product development and an expansion in sales, sales support, marketing and operations.
“With new investment from one of the nation’s leading health systems, a premier life sciences company, and China’s largest insurance company, we are well positioned to expand our team and extend our technologies, products and services into new markets,” Omicia CEO Matt Tindall said in a statement.
He pointed to the work the company is doing with Genomics England. As he sees it, Omicia is filling a critical gap between sequencing tools and clinical decision-making, which, he said, is delivering on the promise of precision medicine.
“Omicia has built a world-class software platform that can be applied at the intersection of genomic data and more traditional healthcare information to generate insights powering both predictive and preventive medicine,” said Stu Peterson, co-founder and senior partner at ARTIS Ventures, an investor in both the Series A and Series B funding.
“Genome sequencing, combined with machine-learning algorithms and powerful data analytics, will provide physicians with more complete, actionable insights at a reasonable cost,” Peterson added.
