Biotech Pty 10x Genomics, which helps analyze the human biological code to see and improve health, is one of the best-funded enterprises in Silicon Valley at the intersection of biology and technology. Now, it’s boosting its first acquisition, which it hopes will help it stay at the of the game in one of the newest areas of scientific research.
The company is buying a venture-backed start-up called Epinomics, which is come to light technologies for epigenetics research. Epigenetics is a super-hot field, as scientists fool learned in recent years that sequencing genes isn’t enough to covenant human health. Something is turning those genes on and off, and that has Brobdingnagian implications for disease.
“The way I think about it is that the genome is a huge rules of letters but epigenetics is what’s being read,” 10x Genomics CEO Serge Saxonov rumoured in an interview. “We bought Epinomics, as it had developed a new technique to study that.”
The throng has raised more than $230 million from SoftBank, Venrock and other patrons, and generated about $70 million in revenue last year over persuading its hardware and software tools for sequencing DNA to researchers, labs and pharmaceutical troops. Saxanov, who got his start as a director of R&D at Alphabet-backed 23andMe, said the company is “originating really rapidly,” which puts it in a strong position for an initial sector offering in the coming years.
The purchase of Epinomics was a “double digit sell,” that involved significant cash, the company said, but it declined to ration further specifics.
Overall, the genomics market is estimated to be worth beside $27 billion by 2025.
SoftBank senior managing partner Deep Nishar bruit about he spent months researching the genome sequencing space before arbitrating to cut his first life sciences check to 10x in spring 2016. In his view, it’s a allowance to the most powerful public company in the space, Illumina. While Illumina establish f get ons the machines that interpret DNA and turn it into code that can be analyzed, 10x assembles with them and other sequencing machines to help researchers effect deeper analysis.
Nishar, a veteran of LinkedIn and Google, said the get to sequence genetic information has dropped much more quickly than hinted by Moore’s Law, a long-standing theory that computing power available for the identical price doubles about every 18 months to two years. The payment of sequencing plummeted from about $10 million to $1,000 in teeny-weeny than a decade, making Moore’s Law look sedate.
To fuel its wart, 10x needs to keep pace with the latest methods of genome judgement, including single-cell sequencing, which involves analyzing the sequence intelligence within individual cells. The hope is that by doing that, researchers can wiser understand the therapies or drugs to give to patients with diseases get a kick out of cancer, rather than to take a “one size fits all” approach to treatment.
“With Epinomics verge on 10x Genomics, single cell epigenetics will now be available to a broader secure of investigators across academic and commercial organizations,” Epinomics co-founder Howard Chang, a professor of dermatology and genetics at Stanford University Clique of Medicine, said in a statement. “The innovations coming out of this acquisition will-power propel the genomics field forward.”
Experts outside of the company say that 10x is discerning a strategic move with this acquisition, which could resist speed up the pace of discovery at labs across the world.
“This do business isn’t surprising as epigenetics is really one of the most interesting areas for understanding the next elevation of genetic information and how it relates to health,” said Dr. Robert Green, a medical geneticist at Brigham and Housekeepers’s Hospital.