2021 has been quite a year for us at SOPHiA GENETICS. We’re rounding out a full decade of significant growth since we began at EPFL with just a handful of people in a 10 square meter room back in 2011. Now, we’re opening expanded office and R&D capabilities around the world for hundreds of employees who work hard every day to bring our mission and values to life. These are a few of the most notable moments from this substantial year for our company…
Expanding the portfolio
We kicked off 2021 with the announcement of three blood cancer solutions, greatly expanding the coverage we can offer by targeting DNA or RNA to detect any molecular biomarkers. Our blood cancer portfolio gives more in-house options to labs of all sizes based on their needs.
In the spring, we released SOPHiA DDMTM for TSO500, designed to maximize the utility of the Illumina TSO500 assay. Early adopters said that this solution helps them to easily see the variant filter and rapidly evaluate the significance of specific mutations.
SOPHiA GENETICS launched a new Clinical Exome Solution in October, which allows us to elevate the statistical power of the data. Rare and inherited disorder analyses benefit from enhanced detection capabilities within the entire mitochondrial genome.
Our latest product launch stems from our partnership with Agilent, extending SOPHiA DDM™ Universal Whole Exome analytical capabilities to include SureSelect Human All Exon v8 by Agilent. This solution optimizes for Agilent-specific sample data to be further analyzed and studied within the universal SOPHiA DDMTM platform.
IPO & collaborations
In early July, we announced our plans for an initial public offering (IPO), officially listing as SOPH on the NASDAQ by the end of that month. We successfully raised $234 million to help us further democratize Data-Driven Medicine globally. This was a major step forward for our company’s growth.
Before that great accomplishment, we were already in discussions with some of the largest biotechnology firms in the world to create lasting partnerships. These partnerships will help drive shared success and evolve the use of multimodality. Multimodality combines multiple sources of medical data that can be enhanced with AI, generating more actionable insights for clinicians and medical researchers.
Our partnerships included teaming up with the Spanish Lung Cancer Group in February to explore predictive potential of multimodal health data in resectable stage IIIA non-small lung cancer. In March, we announced our long-term collaboration agreement with Hitachi to unlock the potential of multimodal health data.
Since our IPO, we’ve reported how we’re working with more than 780 medical institutions around the world. This included a recently expanded partnership with Dasa for the first decentralized cancer biomarker detection solution in Latin America.
We announced an agreement with Agilent to expand co-marketing of our new end-to-end solution, which automates NGS library preparation and analytics processes for cancer research.
In early July we signed a letter of intent with GE Healthcare to match multimodal patient data and cancer types. We officially announced the collaboration recently at RSNA where we co-hosted a comprehensive symposium about the role of the Radiologist and their use of emerging clinical technology as part of the healthcare revolution.
On the horizon
As I’ve mentioned earlier this year, we continue to invest heavily in research and development. This includes the recent launch of our DEEP-Lung-IV multimodal clinical study. It will leverage deep learning-enabled analysis of the aggregation of multimodal clinical, biological, genomic, and radiomics data to identify and validate predictive signatures associated with response to immunotherapy and prognosis of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Our goal is to enroll 4,000 patients from approximately 30 sites across North America, Europe, and Latin America.
SOPHiA GENETICS will continue to enhance medical research capabilities around the world as we enter a new year with great momentum and determination. If you’d like to learn more about our progress, I invite you to join our journey by following our social media pages and signing up for our monthly newsletter below.
