Local firm focuses on genome technology

Thirteen years and $300 million in the making, researchers unveiled the first map of the human genome in 2003.

In March, a California company mapped an individual's genome in six weeks for $60,000.

The drop in time and price is due in large part to a new generation of instruments that can sequence genomes -- the base pairs that make up an organism's DNA.

The new instruments generate much more data per sample, and Geospiza -- a Seattle company that sells software that allows researchers to collect, organize, and analyze the data -- hopes to benefit.

Geospiza is expected to announce Tuesday that it has landed a significant new customer for its software -- its second major announcement in a week.

On June 10, Geospiza said that Leroy Hood, the president of Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, who has had a role in many of the area's most successful biotech businesses, had joined its board.

CEO Todd Smith, who runs the 20-employee company out of an office tower in lower Queen Anne, said Geospiza -- which has sold software for the previous generation of sequencing instruments since 1997 -- was "a little bit early in seeing where this market was going to go."

"With the first generation, we were ahead of the market's needs," he said. "So really what's happened is the market has caught up. We knew there was going to be this data management problem."

He said Geospiza has been profitable in the past but had raised money from outside investors in recent years to spur growth and was now near break-even.

"The first-generation market was really steady," he said. "The next generation has created this enormous potential."

He said there will be "real growth in how many people are going to be accessing this" as the cost of mapping genomes drops.

Moreover, while some researchers previously used their own software to analyze the data, the new instruments bring about "IT complexity" that makes it "cost prohibitive" for them to analyze the data themselves. "They're overwhelmed," he said.

For instance, a new instrument will generate about 1,500 times more data per sample than an older instrument, Smith said.

The instruments take photos of the DNA base pairs and scan them to present a list of letters standing for the bases -- adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.

With Geospiza's Web-based software, which costs $30,000 a year for an average lab, technicians can then take the data and compare it with that generated by other sequences, in order to see how it matches up.

"We don't learn that much from a single human sequence," Smith said.

The software also manages the entire workflow between a researcher and the lab where the instruments are held.

For instance, with the software, researchers can communicate with the lab exactly what part of a sample genome they want analyzed and how.

Other companies are also in the business, but Smith said that Geospiza has tried to develop a competitive advantage by developing a software system that works through the entire process -- from sample preparation to data analysis.

The product is also not customized, so a lab can start using it within a day.

Geospiza's newest customer is the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, which owns 10 of the new generation of sequencing instruments. Before selecting Geospiza, the Canadian institution also considered developing its own software or having another party customize software for it.

"For the company it's significant from the reference perspective to work with an account like that," Smith said. "It really helps us with getting other people interested in what we do."