Biotech raises $3 million for expansion

Geospiza, a Seattle company that makes software for crunching vast amounts of genetic data, has raised $3 million from private investors to tap the growing market for personalized medicine.

The company has sold software for years to help academic scientists manage their experiments, a relatively tiny market. Geospiza isn't abandoning that field, but it raised the cash to pursue a bigger opportunity — software to help physicians more efficiently analyze the genetics of patients.

Genetic diagnostic tests, though still a niche field, are showing signs of growth. Researcher Frost & Sullivan estimates the market at $600 million a year, with potential to double in five years.

Already, gene-sequencing giant Applied Biosystems, a partner of Geospiza, sells instruments to medical centers for genetic testing. Major hospitals, such as the Mayo Clinic, have information-technology departments with spreadsheets and databases developed in-house, that take a patient's test results, aggregate them, run fact-checks and produce reports.

Geospiza has persuaded some hospitals to switch to its automated software. In the last year, it has made sales to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, and the university medical centers at Johns Hopkins and Duke.

The hospitals are buying instruments and software to meet the demand for personalized medicine. One test predicts whether women with breast cancer are likely to relapse and need preventive chemotherapy. Another examines a patient's specific strain of HIV, determining which drug should work best.

Geospiza executives think they have an opportunity because medical centers are drowning in complex genetic data. Kevin Banks, Geospiza's vice president of business development, said its system, which costs $150,000 and up, cuts a potentially hourlong process down to three to five minutes.

Rob Arnold, Geospiza's president, said some medical centers have serious computer bottlenecks. Some are so overwhelmed they have stopped promoting genetic testing to patients, he said.

"Consumers keep hearing there is a transformation going on in medicine toward personalized medicine," Arnold said. "There's enormous consumer interest in this."

Luke Timmerman: 206-515-5644 or ltimmerman@seattletimes.com