SXSW Startups: Nebula
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 6, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Blockchain, which will pitch at 9:30 am Sunday, March 10, Nebula Genomics offers consumers and patients affordable personal genome sequencing and empowers them to control access to their personal genomic data. At the same time, we want to give researchers access to a large network of individuals for on-demand genomic data generation, access and analysis which will help study human genetics and develop new therapies.
Co-founder Dennis Grishin shared insights into what the company offers.
What are your goals for Nebula Genomics in 2019?
Raise awareness of our privacy-preserving personal genomics service and grow our user base. Demonstrate the value of a patient/consumer-centric genomics platform to researchers in industry and academia.
Recently, due to security leaks, there has been an increase in consumer doubts around DNA sequencing services such as 23andMe. Tell us about Nebula’s innovative strategy to use cryptography to protect genomic data.
Nebula Genomics is developing multiple cryptographic techniques to protect personal genomic data. First, we will encrypt genomic data with multiple keys that are held by multiple independent entities. This protects data against misuse, hacking and government access. Second, we use blockchain technology to give individuals irrevocable ownership of their personal genomic data and enable transparent and controllable data sharing. Third, we are creating secure computing environments within which genomic data can be analyzed while it remains protected. This is supported by a homomorphic data encryption scheme that enables execution of some computations on encrypted data.
A competitive edge of your company is that you reward users when they choose to give their information anonymously to medical researchers and empower them to choose who can access their records. How does this feature reflect the mission of your company?
Large genomic datasets will help us understand human genetics and develop new therapies. Thus, it is our mission is to drive the generation of genomic data and incentivize data sharing. We believe that giving individuals control over their personal genomic data and compensating them for sharing will support this mission.
How and when did your team come together?
Nebula Genomics launched out of the lab of Professor George Church at Harvard Medical School. The laboratory of Professor Church has contributed to the development of Next Generation Sequencing technology that reduced the cost to sequence a human genome from $3 billion to less than $1000. Professor Church has also been promoting the benefits of personal genome sequencing for many years. My co-founder Kamal Obbad and I were inspired by his vision of a personal genomics revolution. We realized that to achieve wide adoption of personal genomic sequencing, privacy concerns must be addressed and sequencing costs further reduced. We started Nebula Genomics together with Professor Church to solve these challenges and accelerate the beginning of a genomics age.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
We are excited about the advancement of AI and its future applications in genomics. We want to enable this by driving the generation of large genomic datasets.
What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d had that you’d give to others wanting to join the startup journey?
Try to solve an important problem. Then you won’t have wasted your time even if your startup fails.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
