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Congenica Receives £300K Innovate UK Grant

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Congenica said today that it has received a £300,000 (about $454,000) grant from Innovate UK which it will use to develop new functionalities for its whole-genome analysis and interpretation software.

This award is part of a funding competition organized by Innovate UK aimed at investing up to £2.5 million in two-year collaborative research and development projects that seek to develop technologies, products, and services focused on complex biological data streams and models.

Congenica plans to use the funds to extend Sapientia's analysis capabilities to include other types of -omics data besides whole-genome, the company said, enabling it to provide broader and deeper clinical phenotyping of rare diseases and inherited cancers.

"The genome contains all of a person's genes — the proteome, the proteins, and the phenome represent the sum total of all of the characteristics or phenotypic traits," Tom Weaver, Congenica's CEO said in a statement. "By using a multi-omic approach one can determine not only the susceptibility to a disease, but also its progression within the body."

Cambridge, UK-based Congenica is spinout from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Earlier this year, the company was one of five to receive a share of an £8 million grant from Genomics England as part of a Small Business Research Initiative competition that sought to promote the development of new technologies to advance the diagnostic application of genomic screening and broaden the use of stratified medicine. It's also one of four companies selected to work in interpreting genomic data from the first 8,000 patients participating in the UK's 100,000 Genomes Project.

The company also raised £2.2 million in Series A financing from Amadeus Capital Partners and Cambridge Innovation Capital this year.

Customers of the Sapientia platform include researchers in the UK's National Health Service genomic centers in Birmingham, Great Ormond Street, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield, who use it to study rare diseases.