On July 1st, Cypher Genomics was announced as one of the San Diego MetroConnect Prize winners by the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. Cypher Genomics, one of the leading genome informatics companies, was founded by Rady School alumni Ashley Van Zeeland (MBA ’12) using the business model Van Zeeland developed during the Rady School’s Lab to Market capstone course series. In 2013, Van Zeeland was named a “Young Influential” for her work at Cypher Genomics by the San Diego Daily Transcript. The MetroConnect prize will assist in expanding Cypher Genomics and its business development efforts to improve healthcare around the globe.
The below news was previously posted on Cypher Genomics’ blog.
About the MetroConnect Prize
The MetroConnect Prize is part of San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation’s (EDC’s) Go Global San Diego Initiative, whose mission is to aid in increasing the region’s economic competitiveness and prosperity by helping companies strategically expand to implement global economic engagement.
Funded by JPMorgan Chase & Co., MetroConnect grants 15 winning company, including Cypher, with $10,000 in matching funds to cover up to 50% of the costs associated with the company’s next step to going global. Read more here about why companies are going global.
Why Cypher Genomics?
The award was announced today at a press conference featuring San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and other key elected officials and business leaders. Cypher’s President and COO, Adam Simpson,accepted the award and spoke at the event.
Simpson explained why San Diego is the city for genomics, with Cypher’s neighbors including industry leaders The Scripps Research Institute, from which Cypher was founded, Hank Nordhoff, former chairman and CEO of Gen-Probe, who leads Cypher’s board of directors to the teams at Celgene, Illumina, Lockheed Martin and Sequenom, who are among Cypher’s collaborators.
Although San Diego is one of the field’s key “hometowns”, genomics is a global industry with global impact, which means San Diego has the potential to be the center of advancing genomics for the world.
Cypher is working to solve a large problem facing the genomics industry – genome interpretation. How do you take the 3.2 billion base pairs that makes up your genome and turn that into information that can be used to deliver better healthcare?
With Cypher’s genome interpretation technology, there is an opportunity to improve how diseases are diagnosed and enable more successful development by pharmaceutical companies by getting the right drug to the right patient. Cypher’s technology can also help advance large-scale genomics studies, like the UK’s 100,000 Genome Project.
Why #GoGlobal?
Cypher plans to use the prize from MetroConnect to continue to advance business development efforts around the globe including in United Kingdom, Japan and China, countries that can benefit from using genomics to improve health and healthcare.
Cypher Genomics, San Diego Regional EDC and the community supporting global San Diego also took to Twitter to share their excitement for the MetroConnect winners.
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Lauren Herr is the Social Media Manager for the Rady School. In her free time she can be found snapping landscape pictures and taking advantage of San Diego’s amazing beaches and coffee shops.