Outsee Raises £1.8M to Accelerate Genomics Research With AI
July 26, 2024
Outsee, a UK biotechnology company, has raised £1.8 million to develop its AI-powered genomics research platform. The company provides genomics research services to pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and academic institutions, applying machine learning and advanced bioinformatics to accelerate the analysis and interpretation of large-scale genomic datasets — helping clients derive biological insights from sequencing data faster and at lower cost than conventional analytical approaches allow.
Genomic sequencing has become dramatically cheaper and faster over the past decade. The cost of sequencing a human genome has fallen from millions of dollars at the turn of the century to a few hundred dollars today, and the volume of genomic data being generated across drug discovery, clinical research, and population health programmes has grown correspondingly. This data abundance creates an analytical challenge: making sense of large genomic datasets — identifying the variants associated with disease, understanding gene expression patterns, connecting genotype to phenotype — requires sophisticated computational methods and substantial bioinformatics expertise that many research organisations do not have in-house at the scale the data demands.
Outsee addresses this by providing the analytical capacity as a service, combining AI-driven tools with domain expertise in genomics and bioinformatics. The company's models are trained to identify patterns in genomic data that are relevant to specific research questions — variant classification, pathway analysis, biomarker discovery — and its platform automates the steps in the analytical pipeline that can be systematically handled by machine learning, allowing human experts to focus on the interpretation and decision-making that requires biological judgement. This service model is particularly valuable for pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotech organisations that want to incorporate large-scale genomics into their research programmes without building and maintaining a full bioinformatics team internally.
The funding will be used to develop the platform's AI capabilities, expand the team of genomics and bioinformatics specialists, and build the client base across the pharmaceutical and life sciences research sectors.
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