IDbyDNA

IDbyDNA was a metagenomics technology company focused on detection, identification and interpretation of microorganisms and their role in human health. Its core product, the Explify platform, analyzed next-generation sequencing (NGS) data to identify large numbers of microorganisms — viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites — in a single sample, together with antimicrobial resistance markers, and to report results in a form usable by clinical laboratories. An earlier iteration of the underlying technology was called Taxonomer, a web-based metagenomic analysis platform that compared short DNA sequences from patient samples against millions of reference sequences to identify pathogens in minutes rather than hours or days.

The company was described as a University of Utah spinout and was based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Beyond software, its offering extended to sample-preparation content: with Illumina it offered a Respiratory Pathogen ID/AMR Enrichment Kit identifying more than 280 pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, and more than 1,200 antimicrobial resistance alleles, running on Illumina's NextSeq 550 sequencing system with Explify analysis software. Reported applications spanned routine clinical infectious disease testing, outbreak and public-health surveillance, and, as envisioned by the founders, adjacent areas such as soil microbiology, food contamination response and human gut microbiome analysis.

Illumina acquired IDbyDNA in June 2022, following a two-year commercial alliance. As part of the transaction, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Robert Schlaberg joined Illumina as distinguished scientist, infectious disease, and VP.

Founding story

IDbyDNA was founded in 2014 by Guochun Liao, who started the company while enrolled in the Berkeley MBA for Executives program, together with Martin Reese, whom Liao had met while conducting human genome research at UC Berkeley in the late 1990s, and colleagues from the University of Utah. Liao served as president and CEO and Reese as chairman. Other sources name the founding team as Robert Schlaberg, Mark Yandell and Guochun Liao, and describe the company as a University of Utah spinout. The founding premise was that physicians ordering targeted tests based on educated guesses could be replaced by broad, search-engine-like metagenomic analysis of patient samples — described by Liao as "like Google for the DNA space." More than ten percent of Liao's Berkeley-Haas classmates participated in the company's seed round.

Business model

The company developed and sold metagenomics software, analytics and enrichment kits — including the Explify platform and the Respiratory Pathogen ID/AMR Enrichment Kit — primarily to clinical laboratories and research users, and co-marketed these products with sequencing-instrument partner Illumina.

Sales of metagenomics analysis software/analytics and sequencing enrichment kits to clinical labs and research customers, distributed in part through a co-marketing arrangement with Illumina.