Member News

June 13, 2014

Isentio has developed RipSeq, software that identifies bacteria, viruses and fungal infections. The company said it can do this within a few hours, more accurately and more cost effectively than alternatives, by applying powerful bioinformatics to facilitate analysis, interpretation and management of DNA sequencing data of pathogens from clinical samples.

How it makes money

RipSeq is offered as software-as-a-service to clinical microbiology laboratories and hospitals worldwide through license and volume-based subscriptions. It is being used at more than 60 labs now.

Technology it may disrupt

Isentio said its technology helps physicians provide the correct targeted treatment, which improves patient outcomes, reduces the spread of the infection, and reduces unnecessary antibiotic side effects or antibiotic resistance problems. The current standard of diagnosis for infections is culture-based, which takes between two and seven days and has a 30 percent failure rate. DNA sequencing is only now being used in the most critical cases.

Management team

The company was founded in Norway by Oystein Saebo, Dr. Oyvind Kommedal and May Roen. It moved its headquarters to the U.S. last year and brought in Neil Shroff as CEO. Chief Technology Officer Saebo has 20 years of algorithm design and development experience at Microsoft, Motorola, Infogain and Webstep. Chief Marketing Officer Kommedal is a medical doctor with more than 10 years of experience in diagnostics and research. Chief Operating Officer Roen has worked with a number of startups in the U.S. and Europe. Shroff previously worked at the Stanford Genome Technology Center, sequencing pathogens, and helped to develop new genomic technologies.

Key advisers

Dr. Cathy Petti, chief medical officer at TriCore Reference Laboratories; Tim Hunkapiller, founder of Discovery Biosciences Corp. and co-inventor of the Perkin Elmer/Applied Biosystems DNA sequencer.

Money sought

$2.5 million to $3 million is Series A funding. Its $1.5 million seed round came from Sarsia Seed in Norway.

Grants

$1.1 million from Innovation Norway and the Norwegian Research Council

Potential market

Isentio says the total addressable world market of these types of tests is $1.5 billion.

Likely competitors

Culture diagnosis done by hospitals and laboratories. Emerging technologies such as polymerase chain reaction and chip-based methods are limited competition in pathogen identification.