Extensive backgrounds in genomics and a realization that the healthcare world needed more personalized medicine are what led Dr. Reid Robison, CEO of Tute Genomics, and Dr. Kai Wang, president of Tute Genomics, to found their Provo-based business in 2012.
Robison has a background at the University of Utah, where he joined as faculty and co-directed a molecular genetics lab, while Wang is an assistant professor of psychiatry and preventive medicine at the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the University of Southern California.
At Tute, a word that means “personal” in the Na’vi language from the film Avatar, a cloud-based, business-to-business software platform is offered to healthcare organizations and researchers to analyze and interpret human genomes.
Tute launched its first software product in October 2013 and “made a pretty good splash and generated buzz about this new way to analyze the human genome,” Robison says. “We have built a massive genetic variant database—the world’s largest repository of genetic information. It includes public and private databases, scoring algorithms and tumor sample databases. We can truly power the world’s genomic knowledge through this database.”
So far, almost 10,000 samples have been processed by the platform. “We tie each sample to our database to not only see what is known about that genetic variant already, but to do some predictive analytics as well,” Robison says. “Our IP is centered on using machine learning to go from DNA to diagnosis or discovery.”
Robison says now is an especially exciting time for Tute, because the world is finally approaching a time when medical treatment and diagnostics can be truly personalized to an individual’s genome. “It used to cost $1,000 or more to sequence a single gene, and now you can do the whole genome for the same price,” he says. “Before long, sequencing will become routine and the question is, how do we use this data to approach healthcare in a more personalized way? Tute has done a great job thus far of not just building this technology to open a new door for personalized medicine, but also in establishing partnerships and commercial agreements with key players in this space.”
Currently, Tute works with organizations like Brigham Young University on Alzheimer’s research and a number of labs on molecular diagnostics.
In December 2014, Tute Genomics raised $2.3 million in a Series A1 funding round led by UK-based Eurovestech, with participation from Peak Ventures and other angel investors. These funds added to the $1.5 million in seed round funding the company garnered in early 2014 from investors like Salt Lake Life Science Angels, Peak Ventures and Park City Angel Network. Tute has also raised $400,000 from AngelList, a fundraising platform for startups.
“We are expanding our personnel with these proceeds,” says Robison, who was also recently named a Top 40 Healthcare Transformer by Medical Marketing & Media magazine. “The VP of sales position was the first strategic addition to our team. We are growing our team in 2015 because we have such a big opportunity to help shape the future of healthcare and speed up long-awaited personalized medicine. After landing a few more clients or agreements, we will likely do another financing round in 2015.”
Excerpt from Utah Business Mag’s March Cover Story