PrecisionLife today announces that it has acquired its long-term Danish technology development partner GenoKey ApS, bringing together the leaders in combinatorial analytics and large-scale genomic analysis, and enabling PrecisionLife to continue its expansion as an AI-enabled precision medicine company. Financial details of the paper-based transaction were not disclosed.
PrecisionLife’s platform, which includes technology developed with GenoKey, enables the company to gain unique insights into genes associated with disease, as biomarkers and as targets for drug discovery. PrecisionLife’s business model maximizes the impact of its platform by partnering with others as well as building a pipeline of proprietary assets in chronic diseases.
In addition to its expertise and IP, PrecisionLife will benefit from GenoKey’s strong relationships with the Danish health system and leading academic clinical research centers including Aalborg, Aarhus and Copenhagen. Recently, PrecisionLife joined the pan-European FEMaLe consortium led by researchers from Aarhus University, which is a €5.3M international EU Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop precision medicine approaches to improve the diagnosis, treatment and quality of life of patients with endometriosis.
PrecisionLife will maintain its core platform development operations at GenoKey’s site in Denmark with further team expansion in the region planned. GenoKey’s Chairman and co-founder, Hans-Christian Brahe Møller joins the board of the wholly-owned subsidiary, PrecisionLife ApS. GenoKey’s scientific advisors will become part of the PrecisionLife advisory group.
“The acquisition of GenoKey solidifies a long-term highly productive collaboration around core IP, and positions PrecisionLife for its next round of investment and growth as a leader in the delivery of precision medicine beyond cancer and rare disease” said Dr Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife.
The accuracy and additional insights generated by PrecisionLife’s combinatorial analytics platform have been validated in multiple chronic disease areas such as ALS, schizophrenia, asthma, type-II diabetes and endometriosis as well as severe COVID-19. During the pandemic, PrecisionLife was able to find significantly more signals in severe COVID-19 patient datasets than traditional Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) methods used by international consortia with access to much larger data sets, uncovering unique avenues for therapeutic intervention (1). These achievements are complimented by GenoKey’s collaboration with Professor Erling Mellerup and his team at Copenhagen University on bipolar and other neuropsychiatric disorders, initially sponsored by the Lundbeck Foundation.
Welcoming the transaction, Hans-Christian Brahe Møller, Chairman of GenoKey said, “This acquisition presents an exciting opportunity to ensure that GenoKey’s 10 years’ of pioneering analytics development can contribute to the global challenge of delivering new solutions for patients with unmet medical needs in chronic diseases, which represent a huge economic and social burden to healthcare systems and millions of patients around the world.”
