PrecisionLife continues growth and expansion with acquisition of Danish genomic analytics innovator GenoKey

PrecisionLife today announces that it has acquired its long-term Danish technology development partner GenoKey ApS, bringing together the leaders in combinatorial analytics and large-scale genomic analysis, and enabling PrecisionLife to continue its expansion as an AI-enabled precision medicine company. Financial details of the paper-based transaction were not disclosed.

PrecisionLife’s platform, which includes technology developed with GenoKey, enables the company to gain unique insights into genes associated with disease, as biomarkers and as targets for drug discovery. PrecisionLife’s business model maximizes the impact of its platform by partnering with others as well as building a pipeline of proprietary assets in chronic diseases.

In addition to its expertise and IP, PrecisionLife will benefit from GenoKey’s strong relationships with the Danish health system and leading academic clinical research centers including Aalborg, Aarhus and Copenhagen. Recently, PrecisionLife joined the pan-European FEMaLe consortium led by researchers from Aarhus University, which is a €5.3M international EU Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop precision medicine approaches to improve the diagnosis, treatment and quality of life of patients with endometriosis.

PrecisionLife will maintain its core platform development operations at GenoKey’s site in Denmark with further team expansion in the region planned. GenoKey’s Chairman and co-founder, Hans-Christian Brahe Møller joins the board of the wholly-owned subsidiary, PrecisionLife ApS. GenoKey’s scientific advisors will become part of the PrecisionLife advisory group.

“The acquisition of GenoKey solidifies a long-term highly productive collaboration around core IP, and positions PrecisionLife for its next round of investment and growth as a leader in the delivery of precision medicine beyond cancer and rare disease” - Dr Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife.

The accuracy and additional insights generated by PrecisionLife’s combinatorial analytics platform have been validated in multiple chronic disease areas such as ALS, schizophrenia, asthma, type-II diabetes and endometriosis as well as severe COVID-19. During the pandemic, PrecisionLife was able to find significantly more signals in severe COVID-19 patient datasets than traditional Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) methods used by international consortia with access to much larger data sets, uncovering unique avenues for therapeutic intervention (1). These achievements are complimented by GenoKey’s collaboration with Professor Erling Mellerup and his team at Copenhagen University on bipolar and other neuropsychiatric disorders, initially sponsored by the Lundbeck Foundation.

Welcoming the transaction, Hans-Christian Brahe Møller, Chairman of GenoKey said, “This acquisition presents an exciting opportunity to ensure that GenoKey’s 10 years of pioneering analytics development can contribute to the global challenge of delivering new solutions for patients with unmet medical needs in chronic diseases, which represent a huge economic and social burden to healthcare systems and millions of patients around the world.”

1. COVID-19 studies, see https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.17.20134015v2.full.pdf and https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.08.21250899v1.full.pdf

About PrecisionLife

PrecisionLife is headquartered near Oxford, UK and has operations in Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark, Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, MA, USA. The company’s unique combinatorial analytic platform generates more insights into the complex biology of chronic diseases, driving the next wave of precision medicine applications and finding new treatment opportunities for patients’ unmet medical needs. PrecisionLife partners with disease charities, clinical research groups, CROs, best of breed technology providers and pharma, biotech and healthcare companies to improve our knowledge of chronic disease biology. PrecisionLife operates an innovation engine that translates proprietary disease biology insights into new drug discovery programs, more successful and cost-effective clinical trials and more personalized clinical decision support tools.

For more information see https://precisionlife.com/
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About GenoKey ApS

GenoKey was founded by Dr Gert Lykke Møller (now Chief Analytics Officer of PrecisionLife), Hans-Christian Brahe Møller and two colleagues. GenoKey pioneered the underlying mathematical approach that enables deep combinatorial analysis of genomic and other clinical and epidemiological patient data. Gert was the first to reduce this innovative approach to computational practice, and this has been developed in collaboration with PrecisionLife into a powerful analytical platform that enables the largest and most detailed precision medicine studies.