CHICAGO – In reporting its quarterly financial results for the first time since it went public in July, Sophia Genetics also announced or further detailed a series of deals with the likes of Weill Cornell Medicine, Agilent Technologies, and Brazilian molecular diagnostics firm Dasa.
Sophia said Thursday that its second quarter revenue grew 72 percent year over year to $10.2 million from $5.9 million a year earlier when the company was privately held. For the three months ended June 30, Sophia's net loss more than doubled year over year to $18.4 million, or $.38 per share, from $7.9 million, or $.20 per share.
The company also confirmed that it raised an additional $20 million from a private placement by GE Healthcare shortly after its initial public offering closed. The IPO grossed $234 million, netted $217 million, and valued Sophia at $1.14 billion.
CEO and Founder Jurgi Camblong told GenomeWeb in July that that the firm had not changed its growth and R&D strategy in the wake of the IPO.
That includes pushing beyond Sophia's historical market of academic medical centers into community hospitals and, eventually, oncology clinics, as well as expanding to new modalities, such as a pending agreement with GE Healthcare to build on GE Healthcare's medical imaging and monitoring technologies and Edison data aggregation platform, as well as Sophia's flagship DDM platform. GE Healthcare and Sophia have said that they hope to break down data silos between imaging instruments and care sites that hinder the deployment of true precision cancer care.
Camblong said this week that Sophia and GE Healthcare should have a formal agreement by the end of the year.
Sophia, which has twin headquarters in Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland and Boston, also reported that its customer base grew to 780 customers at the end of Q2, up from 750 in Q1. A new user during the most recent quarter is Weill Cornell.
Camblong said that the New York-based institution is typical of customers Sophia has had before, a large academic institution. He said that Weill Cornell initially is using Sophia's core genomic analytics platform called Data Driven Medicine, or DDM, to identify and classify genetic variants.
Through DDM, Sophia supports analytics pipelines and builds components including artificial intelligence technology for predicting variant pathogenicity.
"We are starting on applications from cancer [with Weill Cornell], but this might go beyond cancer," Camblong said.
This is a strategy, popular in the technology industry in general, called "land and expand" that Sophia has successfully employed with other customers, according to Camblong. Customers often have an initial need and use case for DDM. "As they adopt our platform, they tend to increase the menu of applications that they are going to use," he said.
"We have many customers that may start, with, say, solid tumor needs and then would adopt our platform as well for liquid tumors or hematology applications and maybe some hereditary cancer applications," Camblong explained. "As we gain trust in our technological capabilities, they tend to move [many] things into our platform."
Sophia also discussed an agreement with Agilent Technologies to comarket technology to automate library prep and analytics processes for next-generation sequencing.
Sophia has another collaboration with Agilent, disclosed in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing in July, to codevelop a diagnostic product that will be compatible with Agilent's Magnis SureSelect assays. According to that document, the companies signed a two-year, nonexclusive agreement in December that contains "potential successive one-year renewal options."
Camblong said that the new automation agreement centers around a forthcoming comprehensive genomic profiling assay from Agilent. Sophia technology will help Agilent customers pull more accurate data out of those diagnostic tests, he said.
"Our mission is … breaking data silos across instruments, across modalities, across institutions to bring light to the data and provide the best possible insights," Camblong added.
Also during the earnings call, Camblong mentioned the expansion of an existing partnership with Dasa, announced two weeks ago. The companies, which have been working together since 2016, agreed to create a decentralized homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) analytics system.
Camblong noted that Dasa products and services touch 20 million patients, mostly in South America. He said that the expansion will help Dasa gain a greater foothold in other markets, particularly the US. "This partnership represents pretty well what we can do with any specialty lab, any centralized lab around the world," he said.