Saint Steve Jobs once said that the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. Look no further than next-generation sequencing (NGS) which now lets us read DNA, and artificial intelligence algorithms that help us understand DNA. If we think of a DNA strand as a 1.5-gigabyte chunk of computer code, then genes are code snippets which perform certain things – functions if you will.
The Creator, like every other developer out there, didn’t care much for putting comments in code. After six days of coding, the simulation was booted up, and here we are with only a minimal understanding of how all our genes function. One life sciences company working to solve that problem is Personalis (PSNL).
About Personalis
Founded in 2011, San Francisco based Personalis raised $75 million in funding before having their initial public offering in June of last year giving the company a present-day market cap of around $700 million. The company is in the business of providing their customers with information on all 20,000 human genes (that’s an approximate number), together with the immune system, in order to better understand how to treat cancer. Contrast this to the man