Human Longevity Acquires Cypher Genomics, Genomics Interpretation Software

November 30, 2015

By Bio-IT World Staff

November 30, 2015 | Human Longevity this morning announced that it has acquired Cypher Genomics for an undisclosed amount. Cypher has 14 employees who will join HLI including Cypher CEO and Co-founder, Ashley Van Zeeland, Ph.D., who is now the head of HLI's Pediatric Business. 

Human Longevity (HLI) is the latest of J. Craig Venter’s genomics startups; it was launched in March 2014.  Both Human Longevity and Cypher have been based in San Diego, California.

HLI’s vision is to “change the way medicine is practiced by helping to shift to a more preventive, genomic-based medicine model,” Venter said at the company’s launch. The company plans to do that by moving, “from reactive medicine to preventive medicine,” HLI’s Chief Information Officer, Yaron Turpaz told Bio-IT World in July. The path there includes a massive database of genomic, phenomic, clinical imaging, and other data.

Editor's Note: Turpaz will be one of the plenary speakers at the 2016 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston, April 5-7.

Cypher, on the other hand, has developed software to automate and scale genome interpretation. Mantis provides comprehensive and unbiased interpretation of genomic sequencing data enabling customers to rapidly uncover clinically-significant variants; Coral is a biomarker discovery service.

Cypher has announced a running list of collaborators and partners over the past months including Illumina and Sequenom. The company also has a number of key academic collaborations including: Scripps Translational Science Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Clinic for Special Children.

"At Cypher we saw an unmet need for automated interpretation of human genome sequencing data. We developed Mantis and Coral to provide rapid, automated, genome interpretation at scale enabling disease gene identification, population-based studies, diagnostic development and biomarker identification," said Dr. Van Zeeland in a statement. "We look forward to joining the HLI team and to helping advance HLI's mission of applying the power of human genomics and informatics to improve healthcare.”