Sano Genetics team | Image credit: Sano Genetics
Cambridge, the UK-based Sano Genetics, a personalised medicine research platform that claims to make discoveries and develop personalised treatments quickly and cost-effectively, announced on Monday that it has raised $11M (approximately €10M) in its Series A round of funding.
The healthtech company had raised £3M in Seed funding to develop its platform and bring in ‘industry-leading’ customers and partners such as precision medicine developers BenevolentAI, ESCAPE Bio, and population-scale cohorts such as the NIHR BioResource.
Will AI be able to disrupt the translation market? Find it out.
Investors
The round was led by MMC Ventures along with Episode 1, Seedcamp and various experts in software and life sciences. They include Paul Forster, a co-founder and former CEO of Indeed, Paul Wicks, former VP of innovation at PatientsLikeMe, and Margo Georgiadis, the former CEO of Ancestry.com.
Charlotte Barttelot, an investor at MMC Ventures, says, “Since meeting Patrick and the Sano team, we have been consistently impressed with their unwavering purpose-led strategy to promote access to, and the success of, personalised medicine. To deliver on the promise of this new approach to treatment, there is an urgent need to solve the largest problems in clinical trials: patient recruitment and engagement. This is where Sano’s software platform, which allows them to interact directly with patients, biotech and broader healthcare communities, can be transformational for the future of personalised medicine.”
Capital utilisation
In a statement, Sano Genetics reports that it has doubled its revenue every six months since its inception in 2017, and forged strong partnerships with the top genetic biobanks in the UK and Australia, as well as patient groups.
With the raised capital, the company plans to grow its team in the US and Europe, and develop its platform to meet demand in more than 50+ diseases and 6+ countries by mid-2023.
Dr Patrick Short, CEO and co-founder of Sano Genetics, says, “It still takes 10 to 15 years for new drugs to reach patients, and many will never make it out of R&D because costs are prohibitive. This funding takes us closer to our mission to build the platform that we, and many others – patients and researchers – wished was available a decade ago. One that will make research much faster, more cost-effective, and a vastly better experience for patients.”
Supporting the future of personalised medicine
Founded in 2017 by three genomics postgraduate students of the University of Cambridge, Charlotte Guzzo, Patrick Short and William Jones, Sano Genetics helps accelerate precision medicine research by finding people who wish to contribute to studies and helping them do so on their terms.
Sano has developed a software platform that connects patients living with rare and chronic conditions, such as Long Covid, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, directly with biotech and pharma companies leading personalised medicine research – a market worth $52.4B in 2020 and predicted to reach $112.8B by 2027.
The platform also adopts innovations widespread in other sectors, such as user-friendly digital interfaces, dynamic individualised feedback and an emphasis on privacy, packaged as an end-to-end service that lets people power study from their own homes.
Sano Genetics aims to dramatically improve the experience for those who take part in potentially life-changing research. Participants receive regular updates as well as insights based on their genetic profiles and have total control over their data from the intuitive, private-by-design user interface.
There is no cost to participants, who use at-home DNA kits to take part. Sano Genetics operates a subscription model, charging its pharma, biotech and population health clients for use of its platform.
How partnering up with Salesforce helped him succeed!
