The award will help fund development of the firm's "ksim" algorithm to determine infection relatedness in suspected hospital-acquired infection outbreaks.
Despite the diversity detected in Group A Streptococcus strains from more than 20 countries, investigators narrowed in on broadly shared sequences with relatively low variation.
The method, presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, may provide results in hours rather than a week or more.
Filamentous prophages turned up in a significant proportion of cystic fibrosis Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infections, particular in older patients and drug-resistant cases.
To understand the evolution of brain conditions and other traits, investigators plan to sequence human and pathogen DNA in thousands of samples from Europe.
The projects, set to begin this year, concern prostate cancer, infectious diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, and sleep disorders.
The company has initial financing of $35 million, and has licensed its foundational SHERLOCK and INSPECTR technologies from the Broad and Harvard, respectively.
Researchers used genomic, transcriptomic, and virulence data on thousands of Streptococcus pyogenes strains to identify features influencing infections.
The US National Institutes of Health's All of Us project awarded $4.6 million to the company Color to develop a genetic counseling resource for the program.
