It all started with an epigenetic discovery
Since Cambridge Epigenetix began in 2012, we’ve been innovating in the field of DNA sequencing and epigenetics.
Back then, when Shankar Balasubramanian and Bobby Yerramilli‑Rao founded the company, the world was just starting to understand what epigenetic modifications meant to health and disease. We’d developed ways to measure a particularly interesting epigenetic mark, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, which was published in Science, but this was only the start.
A big question, and decision we had to make, was what was the biggest contribution we could make to this field? It was this that led us to decide to become a company focused on building technologies as research tools for life scientists & clinical developers.
A decade of scientific research later
In the last decade we’ve created technologies that improve our understanding of genetics, epigenetics and what they can tell us about health and disease.
It has been shown that combining genetic and epigenetic marks is more powerful than either alone – especially in a single workflow.
We wanted to develop something that measured all modalities, in one single shot, with high accuracy.
By enabling liquid biopsy analysis of cell-free DNA, measuring all genetic and epigenetic modalities in the same workflow, from limited amounts of starting DNA, we believe we can provide real value to our customers.
That’s what has led us to where we are today.
Biology in every mode
As we enter an inspiring new era of omics, it’s time for us to embark upon a new chapter. We’re thrilled to introduce our new brand; biomodal.
This is an exciting step in our company’s development against this backdrop of an inspiring new era of understanding DNA.
In choosing our new name we wanted something that reflected the modern, innovative, ever-evolving nature of our company. biomodal reflects our journey to date and represents our vision for the future, capturing the dynamism and complexity of the human genome and all the modalities that comprise biology.
Launching our new name – biomodal – comes as we also reveal our first commercial product; the duet multiomics solution +modC.
duet multiomics solution is the world’s first single-base-resolution sequencing technology that enables the simultaneous phased reading of genetic and epigenetic information in a single low volume sample, with one workflow, using any sequencer. Eleven years on from the publication of that initial Science journal paper, our latest paper was peer reviewed and published in the Nature Biotechnology journal earlier this year.
Looking to the future
Reaching this point has not come without its challenges. We have had to develop new molecular biology, enzymology, logic and software to make this work, but we are confident that it will bring incredible value to our customers and facilitate a wide range of new products and research.
We wanted this to work in every lab in the world, with the existing infrastructure already used by researchers. This was no easy feat. It has been a long effort to get to this point and a testament to the dedication and talent of our team.
Our customers have truly made it an inspiring journey so far. Our understanding of genetics and epigenetics has improved substantially, and we’ve seen our technology used by world-leading genomic researchers.
As we launch our first commercial product and adopt our new brand, we’re excited for what the future holds and the opportunity to help you further your latest discoveries.
