Omixon Raises Capital, Launches US Office

14/05/2014

Omixon has opened its first offices in Cambridge, MA to support the growing demand from customers for their HLA genotyping software, Omixon Target™ HLA Typing. The US office will be responsible for all in-market activities relating to sales, support and training for Omixon’s products with an additional focus on business development activities with other key US-based partners.

“Rapid growth in targeted NGS analysis applications, specifically for HLA has made it necessary the move for Omixon to have a full-time presence in our largest market, the USA”, says Tim Hague, CEO at Omixon. The HLA genotyping market, estimated at ~$400M, is a mature market, but currently underserved by existing technologies. As a consequence, the HLA genotyping market is primed to adopt next generation sequencing (NGS) to complement the existing SSO/SSP and Sanger Sequence Based Typing (SBT) to improve patient outcomes from solid organ and bone marrow transplantation operations. Omixon is perfectly positioned to take full advantage of this change, having focused on the technical bioinformatic challenges associated with the HLA region such as hypervariability, the presence of pseudogenes or near identity among some HLA genes, and most crucially the complete phasing of mutations within each allele of a gene.

The move to set up offices in the US comes on the back of Omixon successfully raising funds to facilitate the operations in the US. “Our initial investors Attila Varkonyi and Marton Szoke both had international success by being present as an entrepreneur or as a company in the US market. Our current lead investor, Euroventures being one of the longest-established and leading independent private equity and venture capital firms in Central Europe, had experience of funding successful entries to the US market and enthusiastically supported this move.” says Mr. Hague. The funds will be used to grow the US team that will support Omixon’s focus on US-based accounts and facilitate additional in-market activities.

The US office is headquartered out of the Cambridge Innovation Center in Cambridge, MA and led by Director of US Operations, Dr. Peter Meintjes, who joins Omixon after 4 years at Biomatters, where he was VP of Business Development. Dr. Meintjes says, “With the hub of biotechnology innovation centered around Massachusetts, and the ability to serve the whole of the US, the location was a clear first choice for Omixon”. Additionally, he notes that, “A presence in the US will be increasingly important to Omixon, as we reach additional key milestones through 2014.”

In addition to raising further investment capital, Omixon was recently awarded a research contract, as part of the first phase of a grant competition, funded by The Department of Health (through the Small Business Research Initiative and managed by Genomics England), supporting the efforts to map 100,000 whole genomes of NHS patients with cancer or a rare disease by 2017. Tim Hague adds “We are delighted to secure this funding from such a prominent funding initiative, which will allow Omixon to further develop and validate its market- leading HLA genotyping capabilities from whole genome data”.

Omixon Awarded 100k Genome Research Grant

09/05/2014

Winners from a £10 million competition to help businesses develop new technology to map and analyse genes have been announced on 2 May.

Eight companies were successful and will share a total of £1.6 million. The winners will use this funding from phase 1 of the competition to demonstrate the technical feasibility of their innovative proposals or early stage prototypes that will help to treat rare diseases and cancer.
A further £8 million will be made available in phase 2 of the competition to those companies who are judged to have the best products once they have been developed and tested.

The successful companies are:

Aridhia Informatics Limited
Arkivum Limited
Congenica Limited
Eagle Genomics Limited
Genomics Limited (2 successful bids)
Omixon Biocomputing Limited
Oxford Gene Technology Limited
Seven Bridges Genomics UK Limited

The competition, funded by the Department of Health through the Small Business Research Initiative and managed by Genomics England, supports the efforts to map 100,000 whole genomes (or entire DNA) of NHS patients with cancer or a rare disease by 2017. The products developed as part of this competition will help to play an important part in reaching this goal.

Omixon at This Year’s Immuno B4B-Connection Conference!

06/05/2014

Agnes Pasztor, Omixon’s Customer Support Manager and our French distributor WiraTech Europe‘s CEO Sami Djoulah, attended this year’s Immuno B4B-Connection in Charleroi Biopark, Belgium. At least 120 people from different companies participated in the 2 day conference, consisting of various presentations and introductions to the many different companies and their field of interest. A “business dating” session was also included in the programme, a specialty offered by Buzz4Bio, allowing attendees a very personal opportunity to discuss their areas of expertise. Most of the participants were from France and Belgium, as well as people from Germany and Sweden – predominantly service providers from the field of biotechnology, including startups and larger global companies.

It was an exciting opportunity to learn about all the projects that are currently in progress in “The Health Cluster of Wallonia” as BioWin referred to the area in their presentation. This occasion was organized around immunobiology therefore subjects stretched from the evergreen topic of cancer therapy, through the fascinating idea of curing autoimmune diseases by using the built-in regulatory functions available in our immune system, to the – only seemingly – lighter topic of breeding transgenic mice to model the human counterparts.

Omixon was the only participant this year working with NGS technology, so we managed to bring something new to the already colourful palette, and we hope to participate again next year!

For more info and pictures about the conference, please visit Buzz4Bio’s website.