A Seattle Washington based life science start up Ozette announced that they had raised 6 million dollars in seed funding from Madrona Venture group and the Allen Institute for AI. Ozette is a collaboration between AI2 and the Fred Hutchinson cancer research center. The seed funding which all included now comes up to 12 million dollars will be used for testing the breakthroughs in tracking disease.
The global market for big data analytics in health care was valued at $16.87 billion in 2017 and is projected to reach $67.82 billion by 2025, according to a recent report from Allied Market Research. It’s believed that health care organizations’ implementation of big data analytics might lead to a more than 25% reduction in annual costs in the coming years. Better diagnosis and disease predictions, enabled by AI and analytics, can lead to cost reduction by decreasing hospital readmission rates, among other factors.
Ozette, a spinout founded in 2020 and incubated at AI2, aims to build an immune monitoring platform powered by technologies developed at the Fred Hutch. Ozette’s founders include Fred Hutchinson scientists Raphael Gottardo, Greg Finak, and Evan Greene, who have researched single-cell computational analysis over the past decade, along with physician and entrepreneur Ali Ansary. Ozette claims its platform, which was developed through grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, enables scientists to extract insights from single-cell data across instruments, experiments, and disease states. The company asserts that this annotated data allows interpretable results for decision-making that will improve patient care and patient outcomes.
The goal is to automate the manual, labor-intensive process of cell analysis from months of work to just hours, ultimately looking to create targeted therapies based on the profiles of individuals’ immune systems. According to Ansary, Ozette provides a view of single-cell data while automatically delivering results and reproducible experiments, agnostic of instrumentations. “Think of the Ozette [platform] like an MRI for the immune system,” Ansary explained. “Where an MRI shows detailed images around the anatomical structures, our technology delivers a high-resolution view of the immune system at the single-cell level, providing details that haven’t been visible before. This makes treatments safer, faster to develop, and personalized for patients.”
