Sunquest Information Systems said today it has acquired GeneInsight for an undisclosed price, in a deal designed to advance the buyer’s clinical genetics IT platform.
The acquisition comes 2 years after Sunquest made a strategic investment in GeneInsight, an IT company that streamlines the analysis, interpretation, and reporting of complex genetic tests—and established an alliance with Partners HealthCare to develop a next-generation genomic information system and knowledge base intended to advance precision medicine.
Partners is the developer of GeneInsight’s platform, which has been in use since 2005 at the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, generating some 50,000 clinical reports. Partners is an integrated health system founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Sunquest's investment in GeneInsight came 5 years into a collaboration initially focused on anatomic pathology. The investment has supported Sunquest’s efforts to integrate genetics into routine diagnostic workflows and make findings available to clinicians globally in real time.
Since the strategic investment, Sunquest said, it has collaborated with Partners on providing seamless genetic testing workflow capabilities to geneticists and pathologists.
“GeneInsight is the most clinically-proven platform on the market and advances our ability to deliver a complete and integrated workflow for both inherited and somatic testing efforts,” Sunquest President Matthew Hawkins said in a statement. “We will continue to invest in GeneInsight and introduce additional solutions that advance molecular and genomic-based diagnostics.”
Sunquest said it will provide integration capabilities with other healthcare IT vendors including providers of electronic health records, lab information management systems (LIMS), and genetic content.
In addition, Sunquest said it will also continue to further develop VariantWire, a networking infrastructure and crowd-sourcing platform. VariantWire is designed to enable high-throughput transfer of structured genetic data between and among laboratories and clinicians.
GeneInsight will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sunquest and maintain its existing Boston-based office, Sunquest said. Sunquest is based in Tucson, AZ, with offices in the U.K. and India.
