India, UK based Anuva ties up with US genomics major

London: A genomics biotech company with a centre in India and backed by a UK-based hub has clinched a global strategic partnership with Helix, one of the world’s leading population genomics and viral surveillance companies in the US.

Anuva, formerly known as Global Gene Corp, says the tie-up marks its entry into the next stage of growth focused on creating the most diverse Genomic Bio/Data Bank at scale and enhancing disease treatment potential. With its laboratory and technology centre based in India, Anuva claims to have started to uncover findings of value to India and hopes the new partnership will allow that potential to be expanded further.

“We are excited to partner with Helix as their expertise in genomics sequencing for large-scale populations, which together with our recent closure of Series A funding will allow us to accelerate our plans to create the most diverse Genomic Bio/Data Bank much quicker than ever before,” said Abhishek Kumar, Director at Anuva, a translational research company.

Anuva, with its centre of operations based in India and supported by a Cambridge-based bioinformatics centre in the UK, claims to be creating the most diverse Genomic Bio/Data Bank of Asian populations which is being utilised for research and development within the pharmaceutical industry.

The company says it will be generating new knowledge on health and disease, directly applicable to treatments, on diverse under-represented populations to advance drug discovery through the identification of novel targets and pathways with the ultimate goal of providing better health for all. The partnership with Helix will allow the company to leverage the genomics major’s deep expertise in sequencing technology and translational research.

“Anuva is doing great work to close the critical data diversity gap in genomics for drug discovery. We’re thrilled to be able to provide Anuva access to our whole exome assay as they enter their next stage of growth,” said Daniel Lee, Senior Vice President of Life Sciences and Growth at Helix – which enables health systems, public health organisations and life sciences companies to accelerate the integration of genomic data into patient care and public health decision making.

Helix’s proprietary Exome+ assay is expected to provide Anuva higher coverage on clinically relevant genes and a whole genome backbone enabling tens of millions of imputed variants as well as the full mitochondrial genome. Combined with its own proprietary Genomic Bio/Data Bank, which incorporates genomic data and deeply phenotyped participants, along with a biorepository from diverse subpopulations, Anuva hopes to be able to create the largest multi-population dataset from Asia.

Rapid development in technology to study genomics is disrupting the global healthcare sector as focus turns to providing personalised healthcare with a high degree of effectiveness compared to the current methods. As technology evolves, business models and industry partnerships will need to adapt to bring the full potential of genomics to the global population, according to experts.

Anuva’s partnership with Helix is seen as a significant step in that direction. Its creation of this previously unavailable dataset will empower drug discovery researchers to explore human health to a greater extent than ever done before. The new understanding will enable the discovery of novel biological targets and pathways that inform the development of treatments and also identify who would benefit most from them.