Petagene

PetaGene started as a small hint of an idea: that a team of Cambridge University PhDs could together devise a novel approach to the problem of genomic data storage. Through “Project PetaGene,” a collaboration with the Stegle Group at EMBL-EBI, they researched how to compress huge amounts of genomic data—without compromising data quality. Three years later, PetaGene is much more than a research project. They took their idea to London’s Entrepreneur First incubator and graduated with the program’s sixth cohort in 2016. That same year, they won Best of Show for their PetaSuite compression tools at Bio-IT World’s annual conference in Boston, beating out 46 competitors from 190 total exhibiting companies. Now, they’re a full-fledged company with a suite of products that do what they hoped they would when they began their research at the University of Cambridge: compress genomic data up to 6x, without affecting the quality of the data. Beyond the awards and accolades, they’re deeply committed to the motive that inspires PetaGene daily: reducing the size and associated storage cost of genomic data, so it can be more readily accessed and analyzed.

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