Empowering Drug Discovery through Genomics

The NHS may soon be able to identify your risk of heart disease or a stroke well before it happens by studying your DNA.

• Genomics plc’s method outperforms current tools and could help save more than 2,000 lives annually in the US alone
• Opportunity to identify individuals who are at risk of heart disease and target immediate prevention

Genomics plc, a pioneering healthcare company that uses large-scale genetic information to develop innovative precision healthcare tools, is pleased to announce that it has successfully completed a $30m funding round. Some highlights include:
· Follows achievement of significant milestones in both its Precision Health and Therapeutics division
· Significant investment from leading life science investors Foresite Capital and F-Prime Capital
· Existing backers Oxford Sciences Innovation and Lansdowne Partners also participated
· Fundraise was oversubscribed
Genomics plc will use the funding to expand its work building a patient-centric, population health platform that unlocks a more proactive, precise and personalised form of healthcare.

Genetic testing is on the cusp of a major revolution, which has the potential to shift not just how we understand our risk for disease, but how we practice healthcare. In the clinic today, genetic testing is used only in cases where we know that mutations have big impact on physiology (BRCA mutations in breast cancer, for example). But our knowledge of how our genetics influences our risk for disease has evolved, and we now know that many (tens of thousands to even millions) small changes in our genes, each of which individually has a tiny effect, combine to influence our risk profile. This new appreciation — coupled with powerful statistical methods and massive datasets — has fueled the creation of a new tool to quantify the risk of a broad range of common diseases: the polygenic risk score. On this episode, host Lauren Richardson is joined by Professor Peter Donnelly and Vineeta Agarwala to discuss these scores and how they can reshape healthcare, away from a paradigm of treating illness and towards prevention and maintenance of health.

The world is at an inflection point for genetically powered risk prediction. Better technology, bigger data availability and declining costs of genotyping have all been critical driving forces to unlock our understanding of polygenic variation, and bring it out of theory into clinical practice.

Our mission at Genomics is to use genetic data to drive transformational insights into human biology and disease. Our approach focuses on using existing information, generated through scientific research, clinical and population health programmes across the world, but combining data sources and data types both in new ways and at a scale that is unique.