In the ten years prior to establishing Seqster, Ardy Arianpour was pioneering and disrupting the genetics-testing industry, including the development of a test to detect BRCA1 and -2, predictor genes of breast cancer along, with his Co-founder and CTO Dr. Xiang Li. They were instrumental in the landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision disallowing gene patents, and thus opened up genetic testing to a broader market. The impact on women’s health that the team witnessed directly played a role in the creation of Seqster in 2016.

When Ardy founded Seqster with Dana Hosseini and Dr. Xiang Li, the goal was to tie genetic data to high-quality real-world clinical data. Being experts in genetics and clinical diagnostics, the founding team knew the importance of solving complex clinical issues with highquality data. While Seqster’s story began with DNA, where its name pronounced “seekster” comes from (as in DNA sequencing and seeking health data), it quickly became much bigger. “We learned that DNA data alone isn’t valuable.

It needs to be combined with many other data types such as a longitudinal clinical record stitched together across city, state, or country in order to provide a 360° view of a patient’s health,” Ardy says, “but we came across a daunting obstacle right out of the gate. Our clinical data is not easily accessible. Even worse, unlike DNA data, the format and terminologies used by clinical data vary across different providers. We had to first build programs to retrieve, standardize, and harmonize them. “With our first version of Seqster built, we showed it to an ex-senior executive at a large healthcare system, and the first thing she exclaimed was, ‘Oh my god! You guys cracked interoperability!’

That was our eureka moment when we realized that we not only solved a problem for our own business but also an industry-wide $30 billion annual healthcare problem caused by the siloing of our health data.” Once the news started leaking out about what Seqster had created, the team decided to emerge from stealth, immediately garnering accolades, awards, speaking engagements, and press. More importantly, many business opportunities emerged as a direct result of giving patients access to their “cleaned up” health data. The Seqster team knew they were embarking on something monumental when Bill Gates personally requested to see the platform. That led to their first customer, Boston University, to use Seqster technology to rapidly accelerate the onboarding and monitoring of Alzheimer’s Disease study patients.

Closer to home, Seqster announced a 3-year licensing deal and partnership with La Jolla Institute of Immunology (LJI) to support the execution of a $6.9 million, 5,000 participant Asthma study funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Seqster enables users to pull health data from over 150,000 hospitals, doctors’ offices, and clinics nationwide and combine that information with their DNA and other real-time fitness wearable data in a HIPAA-compliant, HiTrustcertified hosting platform. The outcome is a view of a patient’s “net health” on an elegant and user-friendly interface.

Ardy believes that the days of carrying around manually collected paper medical records in binders will soon become history. We have all known people who relied on this method prior to Seqster, and it is rarely a pleasant story. Today, Seqster is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) serving healthcare enterprise customers that are seeking to improve the health of their members and patients. The prestigious awards and recognition over the past two years demonstrate how significant and original its technology is. Just like the essence of the Seqster app is interoperability, the heart of Seqster as a company is people themselves.

FAST FACTS

• Both FHIR and portal based clinical data retrieval
• API to share data with payers, pharma and providers
• 21st Century Cures Rules CMS-ONC Compliant
• Access to:
  • 3,600+ Hospitals/150,0000+ Medical Groups & Small Doctor Offices
  • 30M+ Consumer DNA Sequencing Results
  • 200M+ Wearables Data

AWARDS & ACCOLADES

• 2019 UCSF Digital Health Awards: Top 10 Data Interoperability Platform
• 2019 HL7 FHIR DevDays Patient Innovator Finalist
• 2019 National Readmission Prevention Collaborative Innovation Winner
• 2019 San Diego Business Journal Top Business Leaders 40 Under 40
• 2019 San Diego Business Journal CEO of the Year Finalist
• 2019 MM&M Top 40 Healthcare Transformer
• 2018 Exponential Medicine MEDy Award: “The One Company To Watch”
• 2018 World Frontiers Forum Young Pioneer
• 2018 SDVG COOL Companies of the Year
• 2018 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions: Winner of People’s Choice & Judge’s Choice Awards
• 2020 Takeda Pharmaceuticals becomes a strategic investor in Seqster