NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Investment firm Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse (PLSG) announced on Thursday that it has made a roughly $100,000 investment in Ariel Precision Medicine, which is developing genetic tests for chronic diseases.
Ariel was founded in 2013 to develop a bioinformatics platform — called Smart-MD — that combines a patient's symptoms and clinical history with next-generation sequencing data to create a profile that is then compared against multiple complex disease databases. The resulting data can be used to better understand a patient's condition and guide treatment decisions. The company's first test, PancreasDx, will be targeted to pancreatic disease.
"PLSG was the first to invest in Ariel because they quickly understood how our integrated genomics and digital health platform facilitate precision medicine," Ariel CEO Jessica Gibson said in a statement. "This is really the way of the future for complex diseases. And now that PLSG has given us their stamp of approval, I'm confident others will provide follow-on dollars."