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Creathor Venture invests in AI-enabled clinical genetic testing company Blueprint Genetics

Creathor Venture is leading a financing round for Helsinki, Finland-based Blueprint Genetics, a provider of clinical genetic testing for the diagnosis of inherited diseases, leveraging a proprietary AI-enabled sequencing and interpretation platform.

The start-up will receive a total of up to EUR14 million from an international syndicate of investors including new investor MedTech Innovation Partners (MTIP), and existing investors Inventure and Pontos Group.
 
Blueprint covers the entire workflow from patient sample to automated clinical interpretation of the results provided in a ready-to-use report, using CLINT, its artificial intelligence platform, together with its proprietary targeted sequencing technology, OS-Seq, developed at Stanford. Already today, Blueprint Genetics is one of the leading providers of clinical genetic testing with a portfolio of clinical-grade next generation sequencing (NGS) panels covering more than 2,200 disorders in 14 medical specialties such as cardiology, ophthalmology, haematology, neurology and immunology. The unique combination of genetic testing and analysis allows the company to gather variant data and link it to phenotype details, further building the already large underlying genetic database for high quality results interpretation. Blueprint today already works with more than 450 hospital customers in over 40 countries.
 
An estimated 350 million people globally are affected by severe inherited diseases. Sequence analysis is considered a standard approach for the identification and clinical diagnosis of the genetic cause of inherited disorders. Market experts estimate the overall genetic screening market will grow by more than 30 percent annually to a double-digit billion-dollar market in the next years. However, although sequencing costs declined, the complex procedure and cumbersome interpretation of results are still bottlenecks for commercial applications such as diagnostics, biomarker discovery and clinical drug development within clinical laboratories, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.
 
Tommi Lehtonen, CEO of Blueprint Genetics, says: “We were pleased to see the high level of interest by our existing as well as top-tier new investors in participating in this financing round. These funds will enable us to move our sequencing technology and our clinical data interpretation platform to the next level in terms of services provided, efficiency and level of automation. Our vision is to bring the use of genetic information to mainstream healthcare, and we strongly believe that cost efficiency combined with uncompromised, high quality is the key to achieve this goal. The ability to automate and improve clinical interpretation processes with software will change the industry and with our unique set-up we are well positioned to be forerunners in this realm.”
 
Blueprint Genetics will use the proceeds from this financing round to fuel further growth, strengthen sales, expand its geographic footprint and establish programs to further increase the efficiency of its sequencing platform and continue the development of its software component and data pool to make interpretation of genetic data more efficient.
 
Dr Christian Weiss, Partner at Creathor, says: “We are very impressed with the potential of Blueprint Genetics, a company that already is a top European provider in one of the fastest growing fields in healthcare. We at Creathor believe in supporting extraordinary ideas in technology and the life sciences as well as the intersection of these sectors. Blueprint’s combination of state-of-the-art DNA sequence analysis with automated software-based data interpretation perfectly fits with our investment strategy. That is why we have chosen Blueprint Genetics as an investment for our new fund. We are very much looking forward to working with Blueprint’s highly committed and experienced management team and to supporting the company in its next phase of development.”

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