Popular Multiomics Tech Innovator Nets $200M to Expand Platform Adoption

DNAnexus announced it has secured $200 million in funding to advance the life sciences industry’s adoption of its platform. The financial round was led Blackstone Inc's growth fund.

DNAnexus, a leading provider of cloud-based biomedical data analysis software, was launched in 2009 to provide researchers the ability to analyze human genome data by hosting a cloud-based data analysis and management platform for DNA sequence data. The platform currently boasts more than 65 petabytes of data, which has grown 70% since 2015.

The importance of DNAnexus lies in the amount and availability of genomic data that is generated by researchers. A single human genome sequence alone takes up to 200 gigabytes of storage, and by 2025, geneticists estimate that more than 500 million genomes will have been sequenced generating 40 exabytes of data. It’s hard to visualize such an enormous amount of data, and researchers have faced a similar problem — only about a fraction of the generated data is currently utilized for drug discovery.

DNAnexus provides customers with complex data analysis that can process hundreds of terabytes at a time, high-velocity computing that can work through hundreds of thousands of samples and trillions of data points in seconds and a purpose-built infrastructure designed to help researchers make discoveries in a secure environment. DNAnexus also provides solutions to challenges of standardization, scale, collaboration and compliance, and urges customers away from “DIY” bioinformatics that can be costly and time-consuming.

Such technology can help solve the issue of not only storing large volumes of data but providing researchers with the tools to perform analyses. The combination of storage and easy accessibility for researchers primes them to make discoveries related to drug and diagnostics development.

“The DNAnexus Platform enables the life sciences industry to derive critical insights from multi-omic, clinical, and phenotypic data to hasten the development and delivery of novel therapeutics, getting them into the hands of patients who need them more quickly and cost-effectively,” said Ram Jagannath, global head of healthcare for Blackstone.

DNAnexus has more than 12,000 platform users, including an exclusive partnership with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The partnership has resulted in precisionFDA, a private cloud-based, high-performance environment where FDA researchers and reviewers can conduct genome analysis to help further the standards by which multi-omic data is included in FDA submissions.

The latest round of funding for DNAnexus comes after raising $100 million in 2020 intended to continue growing its platform. At the time, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals became one of several biopharmaceutical companies interested in being a part of DNAnexus’ platform.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association also partnered with DNAnexus for its neuromuscular ObserVational Research (MOVR) Visualization and Reporting Platform (VRP). The partnership has allowed for raw MOVR data to be transformed and incorporated in the VRP where clinicians and researchers of muscular dystrophy can analyze and visualize the data to better understand disease progression and outcomes. Making the data increasingly available to those involved in muscular dystrophy work will help them to assist in creating new therapeutics.