Hi, this is Antoine from Idinvest Partners. I am a VC and I write about healthcare technology and stuff. I am very excited to share here the investment thesis we made to lead Lifebit’s $7,5m Series A. We are proud to back Maria and Pablo in bringing their transformative technology to life sciences.
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By 2025, 120 million genomes will be sequenced and used to tackle some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. DNA data is already used to get a better understanding of cancer and fields like pharmacogenomics help predict how you will react to certain medications. Tomorrow, genomics research will enable patients everywhere to receive timely diagnosis and precise efficient treatments.
For this to happen, DNA sequencing had first to get really cheap. In the past 20 years, it evolved from $3bn for the first genome sequenced to $600-700. Firms like Illumina, Oxford Nanopore and BGI (China) are now competing to bring the cost down to $100.
But making sense of DNA data is a two step process: first you need sequencing, second you need to extract insights from the data. And that is where the problem starts:
Genomics research requires huge quantities of data. (Today more than 800 terabytes of genomic data is accessible around the world.)
Data acquisition is highly distributed and comes in different formats.
Researchers and clinicians need to access datasets across countries.
Oh and to make things ever so simple, DNA data is so sensitive it cannot be moved.
In order to perform genomics research at scale, you need a cloud platform that enables distributed access to genomics data and collaboration across organizations without moving the data to keep it secured. It demands state-of-the-art expertise in cloud computing, bioinformatics and machine learning (a rare combination).
Before Lifebit, no platform could solve this equation. Bioinformaticians had to build rigid and costly in-house solutions hardly accessible for most researchers. Maria and Pablo founded Lifebit in 2017 in London to build the first full stack cloud platform for genomics science. Since, some of the most prestigious research organisations and pharmaceutical companies already trust Lifebit with their data.
“We wanted a single unified federated platform that brings compute-to-data, instead of the other way around, so sensitive data would never have to be moved. It didn’t exist. So we set about building a full stack solution to completely transform the way bioinformatics is performed.”
Federated means scientists can collaborate on a shared platform while keeping all the training data secured on site. Lifebit decouples the ability to run data analysis from the need to store the DNA data in your own cloud.
I especially like Lifebit’s story as it tells a lot about opportunities for scientists-entrepreneurs in Europe if they are willing to overcome borders between countries and disciplines. Maria is from Greece, Pablo from Spain and both have backgrounds in computer science, biology and bioinformatics. They met at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona where they built Nextflow, the open-source workflow language that now powers the majority of organisations performing production scale genomic analysis.
Today, Lifebit’s platform is up-and-running to:
Accelerate research at big pharma and biotech companies who struggle to handle and unify huge distributed datasets, while cutting cloud related costs by 80%.
Support research organisations who struggle to get access to relevant datasets by running federated analysis over distributed data in one common workspace.
Enable population genomics projects by opening secure and collaborative platforms to scientists, accessible anywhere. Lifebit makes sure data never leave their secure environment.
Fundamentally, what Lifebit is solving is the problem of scale for an industry that requires so much data and collaboration in order to generate actionable insights that it can only really function at scale to begin with. This is why we think Lifebit will become the platform of the genomics revolution.
🚑 Go further
Lifebit Raises $7.5M to Process Big Data for Medical Research, Redefining Bioinformatics
Genomics: data sharing needs an international code of conduct
Personalised medicine - Medicine is getting to grips with individuality | Technology Quarterly
Lifebit Provides Free Cloud Operating System, Data Hosting & Analysis Tools to COVID-19 Researchers