It’s Day 1 again for Seattle-based Spiral Genetics.
The decade-old DNA analysis startup has left its parent company Fabric and is sparking its re-launch by partnering with Microsoft to analyze the genomes of people with heart disease.
Led by CEO Adina Mangubat, Spiral Genetics also just graduated from the Silicon Valley Y Combinator accelerator program.
Mangubat founded the startup in 2009, shortly after she graduated from the University of Washington. In the early years, Spiral Genetics was focused on doing genetic analysis faster and cheaper for doctors and researchers. It was bought by Omicia, which later rebranded to Fabric, for an undisclosed amount in 2017.
Spiral didn’t reveal the financial details of its return to independence, referring to the move as an “un-acquisition.” Going independent will allow it to focus on its new direction, which is more about using genetics to inform the health of an entire population.
The goal of the Microsoft partnership is to train algorithms to predict which people may be at risk of cardiovascular problems later in life.
“We are now at a time where we can discover things that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to,” Mangubat told GeekWire. “We finally have enough data,”
In the years since she first ventured into the genomics arena, Mangubat has seen a dramatic change. The time it takes to sequence the human genome has dropped from around a month to an hour, and the cost of sequencing has similarly plummeted.
