Asadi is the founder and CEO of Bina, a healthcare startup working to make ‘personalized medicine’ a reality. Bina applies big data analytics to genomics, making it possible to sequence the human genome in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.

Today, Bina launched its commercial product. The platform provides physicians, clinicians, and researchers with a detailed picture of a patient’s health. From there, they can make data-driven diagnoses and prescribe individualized courses of treatment.

“Medicine today is very experimental,” said founder and CEO Narges Bani Asadi in an interview with VentureBeat. “Before, there was a bottle neck to crunch the massive amount of genomic data. At Bina, we have created the fastest, most highly accurate, cost-efficient processing solution available in the market today. The next step is to incorporate this genomic data into medical use. Data-driven, information-based medicine is much more targeted. Personalizing therapies for different diseases means a longer and healthier quality of life for all humans.”

There are thousands of genetic disorders. In 2013, over 580,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer. One in 20 babies born in the U.S. is admitted into the neonatal intensive care unit, and 20 percent of infant deaths result from congenital or chromosomal defects. Technology can be used to curb these terrifying trends. Bina’s role is to bridge the gap between DNA sequencing technology and the diagnosticians and clinicians who can apply it to their practice.

“The study of genomics has largely been a research activity done in medical schools and universities,” said Mark Sutherland, Bina’s senior vice president of business development. “They could only look at a few samples at a time because it was too expensive or complicated to do it at scale. There is a tidal wave of data that has not been manageable or in a format physicians can understand. Now we are seeing an inflection point. Sequencing is a powerful way of looking across a broad spectrum to provide insight into the cause of certain diseases and conduct risk assessments, early detection, or predict the possibility of recurrence. It can also be used to find applicable therapies and customize treatments.”

Asadi said her team had to achieve innovations in every step of genetic processing in order to create a scaleable, marketable, effective solution. Bina’s platform includes a hardware box to collect DNA, advanced software to process the data, and applications to turn the data into actionable form. Whereas before a full genetic analysis took weeks or months and could cost thousands of dollars, Bina turns it around within hours for around $200 a sample.

The technology emerged out of Asadi’s PhD work at Stanford. She collaborated with professors from around the world to apply high performance computing and computer architecture to gain a new understanding of human health and disease. Bina was founded in 2011 by three professors from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford. It is backed by venture funding, and pilot customers include the Stanford Genetics Department and Palo Alto Veteran Affairs Hospital.

Startups don’t often set out to cure cancer or prevent infant mortality. However, as technology continues to evolve and along with it, the healthcare industry, a medical system where diagnoses and treatments are based on hard data, where each and every individual is treated  as such, could be on the horizon.

Read a VentureBeat guest post by Dr. Asadi: The personalized medicine revolution is almost here.

[To learn more about the most transformative IT trends hitting health care, including big data, consider coming to HealthBeat, our event for health care executives and decision-makers, on May 20-21 in San Francisco.]

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Yahoo’s previously announced Genome ad product has now gone live, and it promises to empower companies with more accurate audience data and analytics.

Announced at Internet Week New York in mid-May, Genome is based on analysis software from Interclick, which Yahoo acquired  in Nov. 2011 for $270 million. Interclick’s self-service audience recommendation application has been revamped and better integrated with Yahoo’s data.

With Genome, companies looking for more specific audience data can have that combined with Yahoo’s own data, including user searches and account registrations. The company says the app will help companies “understand consumer needs, anticipate audiences’ future performance, and enable you to develop efficient media buys.” It also taps into “big data” to provide all kinds of crazy number-crunching.

“Genome eats Big Data for lunch — literally,” Yahoo wrote in a blog post today. “It takes in more data from more sources than other solutions, then analyzes and decodes it to create multidimensional views of customers that help define the best target audiences for ad campaigns. To connect marketers with those cherry-picked consumers, Genome offers access to Yahoo!’s massive premium inventory, our AOL and Microsoft ad partnership, and comScore’s Top 1,000 publishers.”

Photo credit: Internet Week New York/Flickr

Fresh off Scott Thompson’s resignation as CEO of Yahoo last night, Yahoo put its best face forward at the start of Internet Week with the announcement of Genome, “big data” software to help advertisers better figure out their customers.

Yahoo’s EVP of Americas Rich Riley (pictured) took the stage to introduce Genome following a keynote by Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, whose story was told in the film Moneyball. Not surprisingly, Riley did not mention Thompson’s resignation or even allude to what was happening at the company. He instead tightly focused on pitching Genome and how it would enable advertisers.

“A genome is a complete set of genes,” Riley said. “Just like that, Genome gives you a multi-dimensional view of consumers.”

Genome, which has nothing to do with actual genomes and everything to do with targeting advertisements, is based on analysis software made by Interclick, which was acquired by Yahoo in Nov. 2011 for $270 million. Interclick’s self-service audience recommendation application has been revamped and better integrated with Yahoo’s data.

Yahoo’s press release includes the following points to explain why advertisers would want to use Genome:

– Unmatched data set: In order to provide a multi-dimensional view of consumers, Genome provides access to an expansive and diverse data set comprised of Yahoo!’s proprietary data — including registration, search and behavioral data — as well as integrated advertiser information, and data from industry-leading partners.

– Premium media footprint: Genome allows marketers to directly access Yahoo!’s guaranteed and non-guaranteed premium inventory, as well as inventory available from the Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft partnership announced in November, and comScore Top 1,000 publishers – all in transparent and brand safe environments.

– Actionable insights and analytics suite: From predictive modeling techniques to information design, Genome’s analytics helps marketers sort the big data landscape. This portable suite leverages leading campaign and user analytics to anticipate, optimize, and measure audience performance, turning insights into actionable media executions; marketers can carry their strategies across media plans with partners.

– Best-in-class audience technology: This proprietary data valuation technology is designed to work with massive data volumes, real-time marketplaces, and multi-vendor solutions, with increased efficiency to help meet marketers’ marketing goals. Genome’s core technology is OSM, an innovative and interconnected technology stack that manages diverse data sources to provide an innovative approach to uncovering optimal audiences at scale, resulting from Yahoo!’s acquisition of interclick.

– Privacy: As a recognized leader in developing privacy-enhancing tools for consumers and a member of the NAI and DAA, Yahoo! understands the importance of consumer trust and privacy. Yahoo! provides transparency about our data collection and use practices and extends several tools to empower consumers to manage their experience, such as a global opt-out, Ad Interest Manager for visibility and control over specific interest categories, and we’re now among the first in the world to support Do Not Track.

Riley said Genome will be available some time this July.

Yahoo is the lead sponsor for this year’s Internet Week conference in New York City, but with the Thompson ouster drama happening, we’re pretty sure the company wouldn’t have minded sitting this one out.

Rich Riley photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

It’s finally all about him.

By “him,” of course, I mean J. Craig Venter, the iconoclastic scientist who had his entire genome sequenced, posted in a public database, and analyzed in a scientific paper published Monday in the online journal PLoS Biology. If for some reason you hadn’t heard, feel free to take a moment to read all about it in the NYT, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Reuters, CNN, or any of the other 237 news outlets Google counted yesterday as having covered the story. (The number is far lower today for some reason.)

Ostensibly, all this hoopla is justified by the scientific insights into genetic diversity gleaned from Venter’s genome. These findings, however, are scientifically interesting but not exactly earth-shattering. (More below.) The sequencing has also been heralded as the beginning of a new era of “personal genomics,” although that’s exactly what some of the very same publications wrote when DNA co-discoverer James Watson received a draft sequence of his own genome back in June. (For background on personal genomics, the idea that we’ll eventually all have our genomes sequenced in order to suss out our susceptibility to various forms of disease, see this Scientific American article in PDF form.)

So yesterday’s supposed “milestone” might easily have gone largely unnoticed had the genome in question belonged to anyone but Venter, a scientist of seemingly insatiable ambition with skills and an ego to match. Venter’s genome is not only supposedly the first one to be sequenced in such detail, it may very well become the “reference genome” against which all others are measured. In other words, it’s entirely possible Venter’s genes will be with us always, a fact that isn’t likely to have escaped the man’s attention. When the NYT asked whether turning himself into humanity’s yardstick means Venter may have won the “genome race” after all, genome expert Edward Rubin demurred, saying only, “There is this long history of Craig’s vanity, which for much of the scientific community is irritating.”

Indeed. Venter, a one-time NIH researcher, was previously best known for heading up Celera Genomics in an attempt to sequence a human genome ahead of the NIH’s publicly funded Human Genome Project. That race that ended in a tie and with Venter, ironically enough, out of a job. (It also later turned out that about 60 percent of the Celera reference genome was based on Venter’s own DNA.) Venter, however, also ended up rich and has since founded his own research outfit — the modestly named J. Craig Venter Institute, which of course participated in the sequencing of its founder’s genome — and launched plans to build synthetic genomes in order to turn microbes into better biofuel producers. Next month, he’ll publish his autobiography, titled A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life. (For dueling takes on Venter, see this July Forbes article by Matthew Herper and a defense of sorts in the the last third or so of Nicholas Wade’s NYT story.)

The real significance of Venter’s genome is that it has officially kicked off a new era of “celebrity genomics” in which we’re likely to see a progression of rich and famous people pony up the $100,000 it takes to glimpse their genetic future. (See, for instance, this Globe and Mail story; there’s more in-depth discussion at two very good genetics blogs here and here.) Various poobahs including Stephen Hawking, Paul Allen, Michael Milken, Larry King and Larry Page have already expressed interest in being sequenced. The first ten volunteers for Harvard geneticist George Church’s Personal Genome Project also generally appear to be pretty well-off, even if many are largely unknown outside of their respective fields.

Although many scientists appear alarmed about this development, I’m not exactly sure what all the fuss is about. The reason is simple: In this particular instance, the well-heeled make far better guinea pigs than the rest of us. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that they’d lose their jobs, healthcare or spouses if bad news pops up in their genes. They’ll also have the resources to wrestle with the ramifications of actually knowing what their genome foretells about their health and their likelihood of living to a ripe old age. And, of course, the rest of us will be watching and learning, because isn’t that what we do with celebrities?

That’s particularly important because “celebrity genomics” is almost certain to be a short-lived phenomenon. Sequencing costs are falling so rapidly that some enthusiasts believe it might cost only $1,000 to decode a genome within five years, at which point most anyone with the cash and the gumption can join the genomics club. Two startups already aim to help democratize access to genomic information, and more are probably waiting in the wings (see our coverage of 23andMe and Navigenics for details). About the worst thing you could say is that people inclined to mimic the rich and famous might want to get their genomes sequenced too, heedless of the potential consequences — not an inconsequential concern, but not exactly a disaster-in-waiting, either.

Whether or not the widespread availability of genetic information is likely to be a good thing, a bad thing, or just something we’ll all have to get used to is a subject for future posts. For the moment, I’ll just leave you with this thought: Some visionaries (or dystopians, if you prefer) are convinced that this train has already left the station, and that ultimately we’ll all end up sequencing and widely sharing our genomic information. Welcome to our brave new world.

Now, back to the science for a moment. The PLoS paper reports that Venter’s full genome provides a new picture of exactly how much humans differ from each other genetically. Recall that the two reference genomes published back in 2001 didn’t represent single individuals, but were pastiches of DNA from several people (Venter included, of course). What’s more, researchers blended those individual contributions into a single stretch of three billion DNA “letters” roughly equivalent to the 23 chromosomes you might inherit from either your mother or your father. Venter’s sequenced genome, by contrast, not only represents a single, unique person, it also fleshes out all 23 pairs of chromosomes. Such a “diploid genome” contains six billion DNA letters, and can illuminate the variation among each set of inherited genes while also showing how those genes pair up to create a variety of inherited traits.

As I mentioned above, what that shows is certainly interesting, at least to scientists. It turns out, for instance, that parental genes once thought to come in matched pairs can actually be wildly mismatched, with one inherited version facing off against two or three copies — or none at all — from the other parent. Venter’s genome also revealed a somewhat greater-than-previously-thought number of major variations within chromosomes, including missing genes, multiple copies of single genes, and so forth. (To be fair, other research teams were already working toward these findings using less-detailed genomic maps).

On the other hand, it’s something of a yawn for the average person. Consider the bottom line: We may share only about 99.5 percent of our DNA with other people, instead of the 99.9 percent that many scientists estimated several years back. Stop the presses.

UPDATE: Good news, everybody. J. Craig Venter is now blogging about his own genome, courtesy of CNN.