Euformatics

• Booth: 2013

Euformatics is a Finnish software company that specializes in high-standard bioinformatics tools for genomic data interpretation. Since 2010, Euformatics has been helping medical doctors and molecular genetics laboratories provide better precision medicine for cancer, common or rare disease diagnostics. At present, our core solution is the omnomics Suite which includes omnomicsNGS; for clinical analysis and reporting of patient NGS data, and omnomicsQ; for NGS data quality management.

 Press Releases

• Euformatics receives funding from Recovery and Resilience Facility for the research and development of advanced NGS software and inter-laboratory quality control tools (Oct 10, 2022)

  ESPOO, Finland, July 1st 2022. Finnish bioinformatics software company Euformatics has been awarded a grant from the European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Facility to study, research and develop advanced software algorithms and workflows for clinical diagnostics of cancer and rare diseases. The funding also covers the development of an interlaboratory quality control system that will enable groups of NGS labs to compare and validate their pipelines on a collaboration platform.

  The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) is the key instrument at the heart of NextGenerationEU to help the EU emerge stronger and more resilient from the COVID-19 pandemic. It allows the Commission to raise funds to help Member States implement reforms and investments that are in line with the EU’s priorities and that address the challenges identified in country-specific recommendations under the European Semester framework of economic and social policy coordination. It makes available €723.8 billion in loans (€385.8 billion) and grants (€338 billion) for that purpose.

  Majority of the RRF funding is allocated to the green transition, but other areas such as healthcare and digital transformation allowed Euformatics to participate in the competitive process of applying funding. Business Finland acted as the national level evaluator for the selection process and concluded that the Euformatics project should be awarded funding.

  Kimmo Koponen, Account Lead at Business Finland comments on the selection process: “We went through a rigorous process of almost three months from application submission to awarding the grants according to European Commission funding requirements. We received lots of high-quality applications from a variety of companies ranging from small start-ups to publicly listed ones and evaluated Euformatics to be among the select few that have the potential to make a significant impact in future healthcare through accelerating the transition to precision medicine.”

  For Euformatics, this project marks a major milestone in our ability to participate and get funding from the European Union. In 2018 we were awarded funding from a 14 million euro GEMMA project for researching autism spectrum disorder. Earlier this year, we were selected by an EU-funded consortium of leading central European hospitals to design and develop NGS oncology workflows.

  “We are very happy and grateful for all the support that Business Finland has given us during the past few years when we have expanded our footprint and reach globally. This research funding enables us to plan our development roadmap and offering in the long term so that the products will be based on a solid scientific foundation. We look forward to working with both industry and academic partners to showcase the results during the next several years.”, explains Tommi Kaasalainen, Euformatics CEO.

  To find out more about Euformatics, please go to our website, www.euformatics.com. More about Business Finland at www.businessfinland.fi and about Recovery and Resilience Facility at https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/recovery-coronavirus/recovery-and-resilience-facility_en

• Euformatics partners with BC Platforms and Oncompass Medicine to develop oncology NGS workflows for buyer consortium of seven major European hospitals (Oct 10, 2022)

  HELSINKI, Finland, May 2022. Euformatics, BC Platforms and Oncompass Medicine formed a partnership to bid for the development of standardized oncology workflows for a buyer consortium of seven leading hospitals* based in Central Europe and co-funded by the European Union Grant Agreement n° 874719. The buyer consortium, represented by the Medical University Graz, evaluated all proposals and awarded a contract to consortium of Euformatics, BC Platforms and Oncompass Medicine.

  Instand-NGS4P is a H2020 funded project for improving cancer patients’ benefit from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) by developing an integrated and standardized NGS workflow and integrating information from cancer gene testing, pharmacogenetics testing and e-medication in proper presentation to medical doctors to support therapy decision at bedside. The project started in January 2020 and has now evolved to a point where suppliers for design of the standardized NGS workflows have been selected after an open market consultation and call for tenders. The program will run until May 2025 with a total pre-commercial procurement budget of ~ 8 million euros.

  During the open market consultation in 2021 Euformatics, BC Platforms, and Oncompass Medicine decided to join forces and answer to the tender together to leverage the strengths of each partner and build a strong proposal. The combination of existing IP and expertise in areas such as genomic data management, variant interpretation, NGS data quality control and precision oncology convinced the evaluators to award contracts to the partnership in both post-sequencing technical modules, namely bioinformatic analysis and integrated reporting.

  Kurt Zatloukal, Professor of Pathology at the Medical University Graz comments “Driven by patient and clinical needs, innovative NGS workflows from sample-pre-analytics to medical decision making will be developed in the program by the leading European SMEs in this domain. The joint proposal by Euformatics, BC Platforms and Oncompass Medicine was evaluated by leading experts and selected for funding. We look very much forward to a stimulating collaboration and a successful project.”

  The supplier side of this contract is equally excited about the collaboration ahead.

  Tommi Kaasalainen, CEO of Euformatics, continues “Instand-NGS4P program hits the sweet spot from our product development and expertise perspective. This is really a win-win since we can build on top of the existing omnomicsSUITE product family in close collaboration with leading European healthcare institutions. Having deployed several clinical solutions together with BC Platforms in North America, Europe and Asia, I am confident that the partnership will work well. Oncompass Medicine is a very welcome addition to the consortium, providing value beyond our capabilities.”

  Tero Silvola, CEO of BC Platforms, comments on the partnership and awarded contract “We knew early on that this program provides the opportunity to define the clinical practices for oncology and precision medicine for years to come if we succeed in being part of it. We have the genomic data management platform on top of which the workflows can be designed. We have a long history of working with Euformatics so partnering with them for variant interpretation and quality control was natural and Oncompass Medicine contributes strongly for the e-medication part of the program.”

  Prof. Dr. Istvan Petak, Founder and CEO of Oncompass Medicine, concludes “Our breakthrough AI-powered oncology software can help oncologists find the right targeted therapy for every cancer patient based on the whole complex molecular profile of their tumour. This being the last step in the NGS workflow we wanted to partner with BC Platforms and Euformatics to cover the full post-sequencing bioinformatics and reporting with an integrated end-to-end solution that will be easy for the hospitals to deploy after the project is completed. Looking forward to pushing the envelope.”

  The first phase of the project starts immediately and the results of the first phase will be delivered in mid-August 2022. The purchasing consortium will then evaluate the output of all phase 1 contractors and select the best ones to continue to phase 2. Similarly, after the second phase there will be a competitive selection to award the final third phase contracts to eventually deploy and integrate in 2025 two standardized NGS workflows as the result of the Instand-NGS4P program.

  *The consortium is formed by hospitals from the Medical University of Graz in Austria, University of Florence and University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy, Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel and St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute in Germany, and the Centre Léon Bérard in France.

  About Instand-NGS4P:

  Instand-NGS4P is a 65-month PCP project federating 7 leading medical centers (two are coordinating ERNs) as buyers’ groups with major experience in using different NGS platforms in research and routine diagnostics. The consortium is further strengthened by European patient advocacy groups, a standardization organization and partners participating in the European infrastructures BBMRI-ERIC, ELIXIR as well as several NGS-related EU programs to cover all technical aspects and transversal needs & requirements.

  For more information, please visit the website www.instandngs4p.eu

  About Euformatics:

  Euformatics is a Finnish software company that specializes in high standard bioinformatics tools for genomic data interpretation. Since 2010, Euformatics has been helping medical doctors, molecular genetics and pathology laboratories, and EQA providers to deliver most accurate results for the benefit of patients. Our present core solution is omnomicsSUITE, which includes omnomicsNGS for variant calling, annotation, classification, and reporting, and omnomicsQ for NGS data quality management and NGS-based test validation and verification.

  For more information, please visit the website www.euformatics.com 

  About BC Platforms:

  BC Platforms is a global leader in providing a powerful data and technology platform for personalized medicine and drug development, accelerating the translation of insights into clinical practice. Our technology drives the infinite loop between personalized care and research discoveries, leveraging latest science, deep technical expertise, strategic partnerships, and harmonized, diverse data collections. Our high performing genomic data discovery and analytics platform enables flexible data integration, secure analysis and interpretation of molecular and clinical information.

  For more information, please visit the website www.bcplatforms.com 

  About Oncompass Medicine:

  Oncompass is the winner of the Future Unicorn Award 2021 of DIGITALEUROPE, the association of technology companies in forty countries in Europe. The company is the global champion of GETINTHERING startup competition 2021 out of competing companies of 109 countries. Oncompass was the first to develop a software as a medical device based on artificial intelligence that proved to improve therapeutic decisions in precision oncology. Oncompass also provides end-to-end services for oncology centers that wish to provide precision oncology to their patients. 

  For more information, please visit the website www.oncompassmedicine.com

• Euformatics receives funding from Amazon Web Services and is selected by SYNLAB to design and deploy cloud-based genomic variant analysis software including COVID-19 variant surveillance (Oct 10, 2022)

  HELSINKI, Finland, August 2021. Finnish bioinformatics software company Euformatics has been awarded funding through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Diagnostic Development Initiative to deliver a revolutionary COVID-19 variant surveillance software tool. SYNLAB has agreed to be the first customer of the solution developed under the program. The funding also covers broader deployment of cloud-based tools around human variant analysis for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) pipelines, as well as an international research program studying autism spectrum disorders.

  The Diagnostics Development Initiative from AWS aims to help accelerate research and innovation to advance the collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases in order to mitigate current and future outbreaks.

  Euformatics’ expertise in the NGS software arena combined with the scalable cloud services offered by AWS will make it possible to develop a software tool that will enable SYNLAB to quickly identify and classify new variants of the Sars-CoV-2 disease, as well as potentially help to mitigate further outbreaks of highly contagious variants through rapid screening patient samples.

  Even within the first few months of SARS-CoV-2 being detected in 2019, it was clear that new variants of the disease would inevitably appear and make tackling the global pandemic even more challenging. Being able to quickly and correctly identify different strains of the disease is essential in determining suitable treatment and efficacy of available vaccines. While open-source tools have been developed, such as Pangolin, which are now used by many laboratories to classify strains of SARS-CoV-2 against a reference genome provided by Ensembl, there are still significant challenges in being able to reliably both classify and understand more broadly the effects that a new strain could have on patients.

  Guidance from the World Health Organization in recent months has instructed member states to actively test for new variant strains, in particular focusing on the use of NGS techniques. This has led to an increase in genomic profiling of the virus, but left a hole for a comprehensive analysis which does not require extensive logistics operations to send samples and data between laboratories and potentially over borders. Indeed, in an unrestricted scenario of virus transmission, reducing the time before starting countermeasures by even one day reduces the cumulative number of cases by 40 % according to evidence from Hubei/China at the start of the pandemic.

  As the first customer, SYNLAB will take advantage of the software functionality as part of their work testing SARS-CoV-2 samples in Switzerland. Being an NGS powerhouse in Europe, with sequencing capacity in several countries, SYNLAB is in an ideal position to pioneer usage of the new tool with the aim of expanding its usage to the greater SYNLAB European network.

  “As part of our role in providing COVID-19 testing capabilities to the European healthcare sector, we were in need of a comprehensive software tool to enable quick classification and annotations of positive patient samples. Most importantly, we were looking for a tool that would save us time in identifying known and new variants of the virus. We knew that Euformatics had the expertise and skill to design and deliver this for us. There is great value in having a tool that can structure and automate reporting, including to national and international pandemic surveillance bodies”, notes Dr Michael Morris, Director of Genetics at SYNLAB Switzerland.

  For Euformatics, this project marks a major milestone in the scale of their collaborations that are essential to making a larger impact in the wider healthcare sector. The company has seen rapid expansion of its client and partner base since the start of 2021 through an expanded distributor network. Both funding and market access are key to the continued success of its products, highlighting the importance of this collaboration with AWS and SYNLAB.

  “Cloud-powered diagnostic tools are critical in the fight against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases,” said Maggie Carter, Global Lead, Social Impact at AWS. “Over the last year, AWS has seen inspirational results from the Diagnostic Development Initiative. We look forward to helping Euformatics and other organizations worldwide use the cloud to mitigate current and future infectious disease outbreaks.”  

  The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has increased the focus on NGS solutions to prevent the spread of the virus as well as to understand it and its variants. In doing so, it has also inadvertently set the stage for greater use of NGS techniques moving forwards. The partnership highlights Euformatics commitment to accelerating the transition to precision medicine, particularly in a time when global pandemics are predicted to become a more common occurrence.

  “For us, this is a chance to work together with two organizations who share our mission of accelerating the transition to precision medicine through scalable cloud-based solutions. The support from AWS for this project means that we are able to dedicate more resources to building a tool that makes a difference not just for the current pandemic, but also in the future. As the delta variant continues to make headlines, we can see now more than ever just how quickly and unpredictably the COVID-19 virus changes and spreads. Built on the backbone of our successful clinical variant interpretation product omnomicsNGS, this new tool will mean that we can continue to help ensure the successful use of NGS techniques both within the public sector through our work with partners such as MassGeneral Hospital for Children, as well as with one of the largest players in the private sector. We are excited to introduce a tool that aims to revolutionize the way we currently view and understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while ensuring that NGS technologies continue to provide the best possible insight into how such pandemics could be predicted or even prevented in the future”, explains Tommi Kaasalainen, Euformatics CEO.

  To find out more about Euformatics, please go to our website, www.euformatics.com. More information about the AWS DDI can be found at the program website, and SYNLAB Group can be found at https://www.synlab.com