Combinatorial analytics platform PrecisionLife has launched an agriculture-focused spin-out Synomics. The spin-out will develop and market applications of the PrecisionLife combinatorial analytics platform to improve health and yield of livestock and crops in sustainable agriculture and food production. 

Headquartered near Oxford, England, PrecisionLife has operations in Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark, Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, MA, USA.

Wheatsheaf Group, PrecisionLife’s lead investor has invested in Synomics, with PrecisionLife retaining a minority equity holding.

Synomics licensed PrecisionLife’s platform following successful projects that proved that it outperforms established statistical genetics methods in predicting the genetic merit of animals. As well as significant technology licence fees and a minority equity stake, PrecisionLife will benefit from on-going royalties and a seat on Synomics’ Board.

PrecisionLife may create further spin-outs in the future, bringing together expert teams and investors, to translate insights and intellectual property arising out of its high resolution disease analysis in specific drug discovery or diagnostics applications.

“Establishing a spin-out ensures that potential value derived from applications beyond our core focus on human disease and healthcare accrues to shareholders while enabling each business to focus on their respective customer bases” said Dr Steve Gardner, CEO and founder of PrecisionLife.

“We were keen to work in animals and crops because of their complementary challenges. While the genetics are simpler, we often capture more phenotypic data about a dairy cow than a patient, even in a hospital setting. Synomics enables us to prove the value of combinatorial analytics in a different industry, with immediate quantifiable commercial benefits over existing approaches for genomic and multi-omic analysis,” said Dr Gardner.

“Unlocking the power of biology to enable new innovation through the food chain in order to ultimately feed the world’s billions in a sustainable way is a gigantic ambition,”  Peter Kristensen, CEO of Synomics said, “but I believe that using our proprietary combinatorial analytics platform to find more signal in animal and crop datasets, we can give the industry the insights to do it.”