Freshly unstealthed SV Bio teams with Mayo Clinic on genomic Dx

SV Bio CEO Dietrich Stephan says his company's genomics-powered platform is the future of clinical diagnostics--courtesy of SV Bio

California's SV Bio announced its presence to the world last week, and now the forward-thinking diagnostics outfit is partnering with the Mayo Clinic to bring clinical genome interpretation to Mayo's Center for Individualized Medicine.

Neither party disclosed financial particulars, but the gist of the collaboration is that Mayo will employ SV Bio's proprietary platform to solve diagnostic dilemmas using genomic data. As SV Bio CEO Dietrich Stephan told FierceMedicalDevices last week, the company's diagnostic technology can perform DNA sequencing within a few weeks and then profile dozens of diseases within a matter of minutes, with clinical-grade sensitivity and specificity.

For Mayo, SV Bio's all-in-one assay platform is the ideal next step for its genomics work to date, Mayo Medical Laboratories President Franklin Cockerill said in a statement.

"In our laboratories, we are rapidly adopting and implementing next-generation sequencing as a platform upon which we will be providing cutting-edge genome-based testing," Cockerill said. "This collaboration with SV Bio furthers our mission of bringing the latest diagnostic technologies to healthcare providers around the world."

This is SV Bio's first major partnering, but it's unlikely to be the last. As Stephan told us, the industry has been cranking out genomic data for more than a decade, but the deluge of numbers can be too unwieldy to make any clinical sense. SV Bio believes its platform provides a level of speed, accuracy and integration into the clinical workflow heretofore impossible in the diagnostics world.

And Stephan isn't the only one betting big on SV Bio's ingenuity--VC kingmaker Sequoia Capital--of Apple ($APPL) and Google ($GOOG) fame--is among the company's financial backers.

- here's the announcement