DUBLIN – A consortium led by Arch Ventures has put together a $40 million series A round to back a new startup, Genomics Medicine Ireland (GMI) Ltd., which has set itself the ambitious task of emulating in Ireland some aspects of the pioneering work of Decode Genetics in Iceland. The Dublin-based firm will build a large-scale database linking genetic variation with health and disease, with the aim of uncovering novel associations that could act as the basis for new drugs or diagnostics.

The other investors include the Irish Strategic Investment Fund, the country's €8.1 billion (US$8.8 billion) sovereign economic development fund, Polaris Ventures and GV (formerly known as Google Ventures).

The resonance with Decode is strong. Arch and Polaris were part of the consortium that took the Icelandic firm out of bankruptcy and sold it to Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen Inc. for $415 million. Amgen, moreover, is named as one of the new venture's founders, while Wuxi Nextcode, the genomic big data platform provider which has its origins in the Decode spin-out Nextcode, is a strategic partner. (See BioWorld Today, Dec. 11, 2012.)

GMI is not a Decode clone, however. "They developed an awful lot of what later became platform technology," interim CEO Dan Crowley told BioWorld Today. "We're not seeking to have that level of platform development."

Its primary goal is to build a large-scale database containing genomics, clinical and lifestyle data, with other 'omics data layered on top and a powerful analytical capability for interrogating the whole thing. "We're heavily focused around disease areas. That's something that's been central to our thinking," Crowley said. The homogeneity of the country's population and the presence here of particular disease cohorts will enable it to build "world-class" datasets.

The founding team includes three Arch Ventures partners – Crowley, Paul Thurk and Maurice Treacy – along with Sean Ennis, of University College Dublin, a medical geneticist who is a participant in international consortia studying the contribution of genetic variation to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and autism. Seattle-based Maveron, a consumer-oriented venture capital fund that has also backed Lee Hood's scientific wellness venture, Arivale Inc., was a seed investor in the company.

"We've always had diagnostics and wellness as a really important part of our long-term strategy," Crowley told BioWorld Today. "We don't have a consumer-facing model right now."

The company will establish its own sequencing facility in the greater Dublin area, but for now it is outsourcing genome sequencing to overseas labs. Up to now, Ireland has lacked an accredited lab capable of whole-genome sequencing at clinical levels of quality.

There is some scientific rationale for establishing a large-scale genomics effort in Ireland on the back of what has already been achieved in Iceland (and it's not just because they share the same name, apart from a single-letter substitution.) There are strong genetic links between the two countries that date back more than a thousand years to the days of Viking settlers. That could, conceivably, give rise to interesting joint projects, but that's not on the agenda at present. "Our immediate goal is Ireland," Crowley said.

Decode famously burnt through $1 billion of cash while generating fascinating science but not a whole lot of economic value. It is not yet evident whether Amgen's leap of faith will reap dividends, but Crowley said the conversations he is having indicate that the wider pharma industry now has an appetite for re-engaging with genomics research, over a decade after it failed to deliver first time around.

The genomics revolution has, until now, largely bypassed Ireland. A couple of early stage ventures got going during the first wave of genomics firms that emerged during the late 1990s, including Dublin-based Hibergen Ltd., which Trinity Biotech plc backed, and Surgen, a Dublin-based joint venture between Genset SA and Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). Neither stayed the course, however, and neither managed to tap into the kind of funding that GMI has been able to access.

The privately owned nature of the present initiative could flush out some protesters. In Europe, most large-scale initiatives such as Genomics England's 100,000 Genomes Project or the Estonian Genome Project, tend to be not-for-profit ventures backed by public or philanthropic cash. In Iceland, the lessons about how not to go about that kind of research have been thoroughly learned, and GMI has comprehensively set out how it will manage the genomic, health records and lifestyle data that will populate its database. All data will be gathered on an informed consent basis, which can be freely withdrawn at any time.

Even if some in Ireland remain ideologically opposed to genomic research being in private hands, others will welcome an opportunity for the country to become a significant player in one of the frontier areas of biomedical research. If that does happen, it would further highlight a consistent failing on the part of the country's health system – to adequately support the provision of mainstream clinical genetics services for the diagnosis of rare inherited diseases.