Sema4, a company focused on providing insights into genomics and clinical data, Already listed Acquired by blank check.
The company merged with CM Life Sciences for approximately US$800 million, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by affiliates of Casdin Capital, LLC and Corvex Management LP. This transaction will inject approximately US$500 million into Sema4’s vault.
The combined company will begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday under the ticker symbols “SMFR” and “SMFRW”.
Eric Schadt, the founder and CEO of the company based in Stamford, Connecticut, said in a telephone interview that Sema4 aims to make precision medicine the standard of care. It provides tools to generate and aggregate patient-centric big data to gain insights into medical conditions and interventions that can help prevent or treat diseases. The company combines genomic and clinical information and applies analytics to gain insights.
the company Split out In 2017, the Mount Sinai Health System was headquartered in New York City.Since then, it has established several major partnerships with the health system to develop genomics projects, including the one in Evanston, Illinois North Shore University Medical System And in Altamonte Springs, Florida Coming to health.
Now, with the influx of capital, the company plans to accelerate the application of its tools among suppliers and expand it to cover more treatments. For example, Schadt said that the company’s platform covers genetic cancer and Symantec tumor analysis, but does not include liquid biopsies for minimal residual disease or surveillance type testing.
He added that the acquisition can help fill these gaps in the Sema4 product.
The company began considering listing at the end of last summer.
“We decided to accelerate our growth rate and our role in the health system [and] Providing all the many different areas of precision medicine that the system can benefit from on a more comprehensive scale…Entering the public market is the best way, because the public market is very forward-looking business where you are going, Schadt said.
He said that at first, Sema4 was considering an IPO route, but last fall the SPAC market was “crazy hot”. Therefore, the company also began to explore SPAC, and finally thought it was the right move for them, for several reasons.
“Sema4 was a bit early to prepare to become a public company,” Schadt said. “So in this case, SPAC is a better tool, especially if you have a high-end, very reliable, health-oriented investor like Eli Casdin [former CEO of CM Life Sciences]……another reason is [SPACs] Allows you to raise more cash than is possible with an IPO. This is also very attractive. “
Sema4 announced a proposed transaction with CM Life Sciences in February. At the time, its corporate value was approximately US$2 billion.
The North American precision medicine market is worth billions of dollars. Schadt said that although Sema4 has several major competitors in genome testing, such as Natera, Myriad Genetics and Tempus, the company stands out by providing a comprehensive solution in cooperation with the health system.
“There are not many companies like Sema4 that have all the components-the genetic laboratory testing part, the information platform part, the patient’s participation in genetic counseling and the delivery of test results through the digital platform-there are many components you need to connect to a health system In order to provide a more comprehensive solution,” he said. “There are many companies that focus on individual components… but few companies focus on connecting them together.”
Photo: NicoElNino, Getty Images
