Tute’s Knome-Powered Vision for an Integrated Genomics Vertical

By Allison Proffitt

November 2, 2015 | Tute Genomics announced this morning that the company has acquired Knome, one of the earliest players in the consumer genomics space. The acquisition will further develop Tute’s genomics analysis pipeline in pursuit of an integrated genomics analysis product. 

Knome has struggled to find a successful identity and business model. The company launched in 2007—the same year as 23andMe, Navigenics, and DeCODE—offering a $350,000 genome sequencing service. Back when the lead sequencing platforms were Solexa and SOLiD, the sum got you a digital copy of your genome as well as personal analysis and counseling from a team of geneticists, clinicians, and bioinformaticians.

Two years later the company auctioned off a genome on eBay—bidding started and stopped at $68,000—and began expanding its customer base to include researchers. At the time Knome was outsourcing sequencing to BGI in China and SeqWright in Texas, and the product was Knome’s Genome Analysis Platform (kGAP), which the company said could automate sequence analysis. Genomes were mapped against indexed data sources and variant details then flowed into Knome’s browsing software.

By 2012 Knome had informatics toolkits for both genomics experts and newbies, and made a surprising hardware launch, a “genome supercomputer”, the knoSYS. The 600-lb box ran kGAP software and came with two other Knome software products—knomeVARIANTS and knomePATHWAYS—as well as 76 annotated whole genome sequences, the human reference genome (HG19),  dbSNP, Ensembl, HapMap III, 1000 Genomes, Human Protein Reference db, KEGG, and Human Gene Mutation db (HGMD).

The vision, Knome’s then-CEO Martin Toler said, was to have a knoSYS box sitting next to every sequencer.

Knome’s future, then, with Tute will be a new horizon. “Our first mission is to integrate knoSYS into our cloud product,” said Tute advisor and investor, David Mittelman. Mittelman served as Tute’s CSO until August. “Bringing Knome to the cloud, I think, is a big win for Knome and for us.”

Tute was founded in 2012, and the company’s genomics software has always been cloud-based. The company was co-founded by Kai Wang, developer of ANNOVAR, a widely cited tool for variant annotation. The company’s databank includes 200 data sources, and it offers tools for data visualization and analysis. Tute shares a variant databases of 8.5 billion annotations of genetic variants publicly through Google Genomics.

The knoSYS platform brings Tute technologies that can scale, Mittelman said. “Complex comparisons of samples against other samples and cohorts of samples,” was one of the features that was most attractive to Tute. Knome “also [has] some great robust code with features like transactional integrity that will help us to continue scaling what we can do to 1000s of genomes instead of 100s,” he added.

In short, the Knome acquisition fills holes in the Tute workflow, even as consolidation picks up pace in genomics.

“I want Tute to emerge as the go-to platform for physicians that are trying to gain insight from their patient’s genomes—whether to identify risks to future children (carrier screening), guide dosing and drug selection (pharmacogenomics), etc.,” Mittelman explained in an email. “We can’t just offer a couple parts of the process—we need the integrated vertical solution. Knome fills in some key steps and accelerates us towards this vertical.”

Financial details were not disclosed; both companies are private. Since its founding in 2012, Tute has raised about $7.7 million. Knome has raised closer to $29 million; its last funding round was a $13 million round in January 2014.

Tute has also not yet made any staffing or leadership announcements. Tute is based in Provo, Utah. Knome is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.