Personalis said the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has issued a new task order valued at approximately $31 million after extending for a year its contract with the company for advanced genomics and data analysis services related to the VA’s Million Veterans Project (VA MVP), for which it is the sole sequencing provider.
The new task order brings to about $175 million the cumulative value of task orders issued by the VA to Personalis, a Menlo Park, CA, company specializing in population sequencing and cancer genomics.
The new task order follows the VA extending for one year, through September 2021, its contract with Personalis. The company in September 2017 entered into its original one-year contract with the VA, with three one-year option renewal periods. Each September since 2017, Personalis has received task orders from the VA.
During the second quarter, the VA generated $14.75 million in revenue for Personalis—accounting for more than three-quarters (76%) of the company’s $19.495 million in total revenue reported for the quarter, up 23% from a year ago.
The VA revenue represented a nearly 77% leap from the $8.356 million generated by the department in Q2 2019. The increase was driven by an increase in the volume of samples tested year over year, Personalis said.
Also during the second quarter in June, Personalis completed the 75,000th whole human genome sequenced for the VA MVP. All of the genomes were sequenced in the company’s laboratory in Menlo Park. Two thirds of those genomes, more than 50,000, were sequenced in the 12 months ending in June.
Personalis said it has delivered over 87,000 genomes to ate, has received over 100,000 samples, and is continuing to receive samples from the MVP.
Personalis was first contracted by the VA MVP to provide DNA sequencing and data analysis services in 2012. Since then, Personalis has invested in technology and infrastructure to expand its high-volume capabilities and has developed sophisticated data systems for sample tracking and processing, and for managing large amounts of genetic data.
“We are extremely pleased with our ongoing relationship with the VA MVP, which represents the largest whole genome sequencing project in the United States,” Personalis CEO John West said yesterday in a statement. “New orders from our biopharma and other customers have also continued to be strong. Year to date, those orders are almost double the level received in the first three quarters of 2019. Orders from all of our customers, taken together, are significantly above the levels received during the first three quarters of 2019.”
In reporting second-quarter results on August 6, Personalis said 32 customers had placed orders for NeXT Liquid Biopsy™ as of June 30, with six of those customers placing their first orders in the second quarter of 2020. NeXT Liquid Biopsy is an exome-scale, tumor-profiling platform designed to use blood samples from advanced-stage solid tumor cancer patients. According to the company, NeXT Liquid Biopsy monitors over twenty times more genes than the majority of liquid biopsy cancer panels being marketed today
