Indian to invest in UK company to democratise healthcare

Sumit Jamuar, Global Gene Corp's co-founder and CEO said, “We believe we currently have the largest data set for the Indian population and are expanding to other ethnicities.”

London, Feb 10: A leading Indian tech entrepreneur has decided to invest in a UK-based genomics data platform company to "democratise precision healthcare" and help pharmaceuticals develop targeted therapeutics.

Ambarish Mitra, well known as the co-founder and CEO of Blippar – an augmented reality and computer vision based AI application platform – will invest in the Cambridge-based Global Gene Corp to bring medicine to the masses.

"Global Gene Corp sits at the convergence point of genomic & life sciences, machine learning and big data technologies. They have fundamentally disrupted the business model to deliver a platform that is scalable and affordable – which is key to bringing precision medicine to the masses," Mitra said.

Genomics seeks to sequence, assemble, and ultimately understand the function of genomes, the complete set of DNA within a single cell of an organism. The insights gained through genomics help scientists better understand disease and then develop more effective drug delivery systems and therapeutics. The Global Gene Corp team discovered that over 60 per cent of the world's population is almost completely unrepresented by the available genomic data – mainly of Asians and Africans.

"We have made it our mission to build the largest high-fidelity genomics data platform of analysed and sequenced DNA along with clinical longitudinal data sets from every ethnic group in order to help pharmaceuticals develop targeted therapeutics. We're particularly looking at underexplored populations from Asia and Africa," said Sumit Jamuar, Global Gene Corp's co-founder and CEO.

"We believe we currently have the largest data set for the Indian population and are expanding to other ethnicities. This has only been made possible due to our collaboration with over 50 organisations across the world," Jamuar said. Global Gene Corp's R&D centre is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge, alongside the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which played an important role in the original sequencing of the human genome.

It is one of only three companies selected to be part of the first cohort of "cutting-edge" businesses to move into the Campus' new 42-million-pound Biodata Innovation Centre in July 2016.

PTI