Sunquest Information Systems Acquires GeneInsight

By Bio-IT World Staff

April 4, 2016 | Sunquest Information Systems Inc. today announced the acquisition of GeneInsight Inc., an IT company that streamlines the analysis, interpretation and reporting of complex genetic tests, and was honored in 2013 at the Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards with the Editors’ Choice Award.

The GeneInsight platform was developed by Partners HealthCare and has been in continuous clinical use since 2005 at the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine. “When you do sequencing-based tests you start finding these variants of unknown significance on a regular basis and you need mechanisms for dealing with that, and that really was the impetus for building GeneInsight and tracking the data and the knowledge lifecycle around each one of these variants,” Sandy Aronson, Executive Director of IT for the Partners Healthcare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine (PCPGM), told Bio-IT World in 2013.

In 2014, Sunquest made a strategic investment in GeneInsight and established an alliance with Partners to accelerate genomic-based medicine. Since that time, Sunquest and Partners have collaborated to provide seamless genetic testing workflow capabilities to geneticists and pathologists alike.

“We are at the beginning of the most exciting decade in healthcare, and precision medicine is one of our highest priorities for innovation,” said Matthew Hawkins, president of Sunquest in a press release announcing the acquisition. “GeneInsight is the most clinically-proven platform on the market and advances our ability to deliver a complete and integrated workflow for both inherited and somatic testing efforts. We will continue to invest in GeneInsight and introduce additional solutions that advance molecular and genomic-based diagnostics.”

GeneInsight was built to effectively analyze data and automatically generate patient reports. Sunquest’s investment in GeneInsight supports its efforts to integrate genetics into routine diagnostic workflows and make findings available to clinicians globally in real-time. Sunquest will provide integration capabilities with other healthcare IT vendors including EHRs, LIMS and genetic content providers. The company says it will also continue to further develop VariantWire, a networking infrastructure and crowd-sourcing platform designed to enable high-throughput transfer of structured genetic data between and among laboratories and clinicians.

Under the terms of the agreement, GeneInsight will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sunquest and maintain its existing Boston-based office.

“GeneInsight’s goal is to provide clinicians and laboratories with the ability to constantly improve clinical genetic processes and enable deeper cross-organizational communication for the benefit of patients,” said Sandy Aronson, executive director of information technology, Partners HealthCare’s Personalized Medicine and a founder of GeneInsight in the press release. “Sunquest will bring the GeneInsight solution to far more institutions, furthering its integration into pathology workflows and, by doing so, enable it to help many more people.”