Virginia Tech start-up company chosen for prestigious entrepreneurship program
A Virginia Tech start-up company, Arpeggi, may have the answers health-care professionals have been seeking to better utilize genomics in the clinic.
And it may be able to deliver those solutions even more quickly, thanks to its selection into the GE and StartUp Health Academy Entrepreneurship Program, which helps early stage consumer health companies navigate the challenges of building successful companies.
Co-founded by David Mittelman, research associate professor at Virginia Tech's Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, and his partners Nir Leibovich and Jason Wang, the company seeks to streamline and effectively commoditize the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data.
Arpeggi develops tools to analyze and process vast amounts of genomic information on local networks and in the cloud. One tool it has recently released is a collaborative online resource called GCAT, short for Genome Comparison and Analytic Testing, which compares multiple analysis tools across a variety of crowd-sourced metrics and datasets.
“Nir and Jason have a long history with big data analytics and when we got together, the first thing they did was build an internal benchmark system for comparing analysis tools,” Mittelman said. “It has been really useful and I am thrilled that we can now make it available to everyone. The entire industry stands to gain from the standardization of genomic analysis.”
Out of 400 applications from 22 countries, Arpeggi was one of only 13 companies chosen to be part of the initiative. Arpeggi will be assigned a GE mentor who will help develop its business model and give the company access to resources it might not otherwise have had over the next three years.
The consumer health Entrepreneurship Program is a $6 billion partnership between GE and StartUp Health in an attempt to jump-start companies that will directly benefit the quality, access, and affordability of health care, according to the GE website.
Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties assisted in the creation of the company.
