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CONGENICA AWARDED £300k INNOVATE UK GRANT TO UNLOCK STRATIFIED MEDICINE LIFE SCIENCES MINISTER ANNOUNCES
CAMBRIDGE UK, UK - Sep 29, 2015 - Life Sciences Minister George Freeman MP today announced at the GREAT Healthcare Week at the Milan Expo, that Congenica, a world leading developer of genome-based discovery and diagnostic technologies, has been awarded £300,000 by Innovate UK as part of its Finding value in complex data competition.
The UK has pioneered the adoption of stratified medicine - the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient - an approach designed to improve the effectiveness of disease prevention and treatment. At the core of this strategy is the need to detect and classify diseases more objectively; Congenica has been awarded an Innovate UK grant to facilitate the definition of disease at the molecular level.
Life Sciences Minister George Freeman MP said:
We are determined to make the UK the best country in Europe to innovate and to grow a business. Innovation is key to our competitiveness and productivity. This £300,000 investment will help to deliver innovative, personalised treatments that can make a real difference to NHS patients and cement the UKs position as a world-leader in genomic science.
Dr Tom Weaver, CEO of Cambridge-based Congenica, a spinout from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, says that this grant will accelerate the development of a multi-omic approach to disease classification.
He explains; The genome contains all of a persons genes - the proteome, the proteins and the phenome represent the sum total of all of the characteristics or phenotypic traits. By using a multi-omic approach one can determine not only the susceptibility to a disease, but also its progression within the body.
Creating tools that can handle and analyse this complex data and present it in a meaningful way to hospital consultants and drug developers is the holy grail of stratified medicine.
Congenicas platform SapientiaTM has been developed to analyse and interpret whole genome data and has been validated by Genomics England. With this grant Congenica will be able to extend its capability to include other types of -omics data.
The model developed by Genomics England, in which all stakeholders - patients, clinicians, geneticists and technologists - are involved, has proven successful in supporting the adoption of Sapientia. As a result of including end users from the outset, Sapientia is a robust diagnostic tool that has already been readily adopted by the NHS Genomic Centres in Birmingham, Great Ormond Street, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield to assist with the detection and definition of rare diseases.
Congenica will be taking a similar stakeholder approach to this next phase, which will extend the functionality of Sapientia to enable broader and deeper clinical phenotyping of rare diseases and inherited cancers.
This project is the first of many steps to achieve this level of understanding. It aims to create a proof of concept for further investors showing that Congenica can unlock this stratified clinical data prize.
-ENDS -
Notes for editors follow
Media enquiries Congenica: Rachel Holdsworth/Sarah Carr, Holdsworth Associates PR
Tel: +44 1954 202789 or email: sarah.carr@holdsworth-associates.co.uk
Media enquiries UK Trade & Investment: Sophie Benger Communications
UK Trade & Investment Tel: +44 (0)20 7215 4815 | E-mail: sophie.benger@ukti.gsi.gov.uk
Innovate UK Stratified Medicine
Innovate UK has brokered a £200 million UK alliance (the five year Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform) to aid stratified medicine advances. This includes government action on big data, electronic records etc and the recent initiatives such as Genomics Englands 10,000 Genomes Project, which are designed to create an enabling environment for stratified medicine.
The move towards a stratified medicine strategy is being driven partially through the development of more targeted treatments discovered through the deeper understanding of disease - particularly in cancer and rare diseases. And also by the potential benefits it offers to patients, prescribers, payers, regulators, the biopharmaceutical and diagnostics industries and to UK plc.
It is anticipated that stratified medicine will form a significant component of a future UK-based integrated healthcare system.
About Congenica
Congenica is a world leading developer of genome-based discovery and diagnostic technologies.
Congenica is a spin-out from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It was founded by six world leading geneticists and bioinformaticians in genomic sequencing, including Dr Richard Durbin who led the international 1000 Genomes Project and the UK 100,000 Genomes Project, and Dr Matthew Hurles, Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and a leader in the Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) project.
Congenica has developed SapientiaTM technology platform, which allows genome scale DNA sequence data to be presented within a clinically actionable diagnostic report. It is based on pioneering research from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, NHS clinicians and regional genetic testing laboratories.
This underlying technology has been validated by leading independent institutes and clinicians, including Genomics England Ltd. (www.congenica.com).
About the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the world's leading genome centres. Through its ability to conduct research at scale, it is able to engage in bold and long-term exploratory projects that are designed to influence and empower medical science globally. Institute research findings, generated through its own research programmes and through its leading role in international consortia, are being used to develop new diagnostics and treatments for human disease. (www.sanger.ac.uk).
