Follow The Customer: DNAnexus On The New Wave In Bioinformatics
By Allison Proffitt
March 22, 2017 | Since DNAnexus unveiled its first commercial offering in 2010, the company has already seen more than its share of market change. But DNAnexus CEO Richard Daly tells Bio-IT World that the company’s mantra has been “Follow the Customer”, and it has paid off.
Just three years ago, secondary analysis was bioinformatics’ critical issue. Sequencing capacity worldwide was growing rapidly, outpacing groups’ ability to process their data. The company’s original commercial success came from linking up with high volume sequencing centers like Baylor, Regeneron, Natera and others to facilitate secondary analysis.
By 2015, enterprise centers were managing large networks of users and large scale collaborations were underway. It became clear that the value of genomic data increases dramatically if you can put it in a network that’s sharable, Daly said. The epiphany sparked a rapid scaling for DNAnexus across North America, Europe, Australia, and Singapore.
In 2015 DNAnexus linked with WuXiAppTech, launching the DNAnexus cloud within China, “which now gave us true global reach,” Daly said. The entry into China was a milestone, he said. “Now you could look at data and tools seamlessly whether you were in Basal, Switzerland; Cambridge, Massachusetts; or Shanghai.”
Not long after, DNAnexus won the bid to build FDA’s PrecisionFDA platform, which launched early last year, and won a Bio-IT World Best Practices Award in 2016. Now 600 global enterprises are talking with FDA across the platform, Daly said, and the number grows daily.
The datasets are big and getting bigger. It became clear, Daly says, that people couldn’t keep downloading data to work with. Data and tools must both be in the cloud, and customers need a complex IT infrastructure that can be shared.
“This is when a true picture of the company emerged,” he says: “a complex bioinformatics pipeline running on top of a global network.”
The next iteration of bioinformatics will largely be cloud-based, and it will be fluid, Daly believes. Global pharma companies know that genomic data must be merged with phenotypic and image data. All of these data will need to be incorporated into clinical trials, and it’s going to take a wider, connected research community. But to the industry, the details remain fuzzy.
DNAnexus’ strength, Daly says, is a very intense, agile co-development process with its customers.
The tools that will solve the new data problems are still developing, Daly says. Machine learning, for example, will likely play a crucial role in the future of bioinformatics, even if we aren’t sure exactly what that looks like. “That’s an example, but not the only example, of how the velocity of this particular area of managing genomic and bioinformatics is extraordinarily high.”
For the business, that means rapid growth of both headcount and revenue. In 2016, headcount grew from 50 to 90 and will probably double again in the next 9 months, Daly predicts. Revenue more than doubled in 2016, and he expects similar growth in 2017.
Already in 2017 the company has announced four strategic hires, appointing George Asimenos as Chief Technology Officer; John Ellithorpe as Chief Product Officer; Fan Fan as Vice President of Product Management; and Brady Davis as VP of Strategy and Marketing. The new team members add the “next layer of talent” Daly says, for the growing company.
Level Up
In 2017 and beyond, Daly sees DNAnexus with a great presence in and support of federated datasets.
Asking big questions requires big datasets, but Daly sees patient consent emerging as a critical component as well. “The single most important thing in this entire chain of technology is patient trust. That allows somebody to obtain patient consent,” he says.
The best person to obtain consent is the treating physician, but no individual doctor can generate a sufficiently large dataset. The solution is a federated pool of therapy- or indication-specific data. This how people are going to scale to these larger, more relevant datasets, Daly believes, and he is excited about the examples he’s already seen: the network at Rady Children’s Hospital and the M2Gen consortium for example.
“This isn’t a DNAnexus idea; this is happening! And we’re the infrastructure to facilitate it happening,” Daly says.
