Syapse, a Precision Medicine Enabler Named Among 2015’s Top 30 Healthcare Startups, Files IPO Prospectus

In this world of big data, you can choose to build advertising networks, develop financial instruments, or help retailers identify target consumer segments. Meanwhile, you have another option: leveraging precision medicine software at the right time to treat cancer, prevent heart disease, and prescribe the appropriate medications for patients.

Sam Hawgood, Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, stated, “The advent of the precision medicine era is expected to drive advances in health care over the coming decades by enhancing our understanding of the molecular basis of disease and our capabilities, thereby enabling more accurate treatment and prevention.”

Genetic and molecular data, such as tumor genomics, have become essential for diagnosing molecular subtypes of diseases and determining appropriate interventional therapies. However, clinicians are increasingly overwhelmed when using these novel data types for clinical decision-making. Current hospital electronic health records (EHRs) and other IT systems are unable to handle the vast volume of genomic and molecular data. Understanding the implications of genetic and molecular data is far more complex than interpreting standard laboratory tests, necessitating the continuous translation of complex knowledge into actionable guidance and its ongoing delivery.

Syapse, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has established a cloud-based SaaS solution that serves healthcare practitioners at the forefront of precision medicine. Built on a data platform that integrates semantic technologies, data integration, and scalable enterprise back-end systems, the service provides reliable support for applications leveraging genomic and other molecular data. On this platform, the company has developed a single-page JavaScript application featuring an innovative, semantic metadata-driven interface. Syapse assists healthcare institutions in utilizing next-generation genomic and molecular data alongside diverse clinical data from multiple clinical systems—including medical history, treatments, outcomes, and costs—to facilitate optimal decision-making in patient care.

Syapse empowers healthcare providers by delivering actionable insights from genomic and molecular data. Through an intuitive web interface, physicians can access a comprehensive molecular profile of each patient’s laboratory results. Clinical decision-making guided by institutional protocols enhances the accuracy of diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. With Syapse, clinicians can directly order MDx tests, initiate medication procurement, enroll patients in molecularly matched clinical trials, and capture relevant data. Over time, users of this robust, information-rich platform will be able to progressively improve the quality of care.

Syapse User Community

Clinician:
1. Review the patient's molecular and clinical history
Based on patients’ disease histories, genomic and molecular data presented are most effective for clinical decision-making. Syapse connects electronic health records (EHRs) and other clinical IT systems, providing clinicians with a comprehensive, integrated view of patients’ genomic and molecular data, medical history, treatments, pathology, radiology, laboratory results, and outcomes.
2. Molecular Testing Orders
As the use of novel molecular diagnostic tests expands, integrating them into clinical workflows becomes increasingly challenging. Syapse simplifies the utilization process by recommending tests appropriate for the patient’s clinical context and automatically populating test order forms with the corresponding data.
3. Selection of Molecular Targeted Therapy
As genomic and molecular data increasingly serve as critical decision-making criteria, patient care strategies are becoming more complex. Syapse provides care pathways that offer actionable guidance on treatment options, clinical trial enrollment, and clinician selection based on molecular profiling.
4. Simplify Complex Clinical Processes
Precision medicine processes require complex clinical workflows. Syapse simplifies these complex clinical processes by integrating test ordering, decision support, drug procurement, clinical documentation, and results capture into existing electronic health record (EHR)-based clinical workflows.
5. Identify molecular and clinical profiles similar to those of the patient
Current medical IT systems do not allow physicians to search for patients with specific molecular or clinical characteristics. For each patient, Syapse automatically displays patients with similar profiles, enabling physicians to apply historical outcomes to current care strategies.

Medical Institutions:
Syapse has currently partnered with multiple healthcare service organizations, including Sarah Cannon, Intermountain, Poswell Park, UCSF, Stanford University School of Medicine, Sanford Health, and Swedish.
1. Integrate clinical molecular data from diverse sources and legacy systems
No comprehensive platform consolidates genomic and molecular data in a single location. Syapse captures any factor involved in patient care, enabling healthcare institutions to query clinical histories, laboratory results, regulatory compliance data, and molecular data across patient populations.
2. Collaborate on Patient Care Strategies
Effective care often requires collaboration among multiple specialists on patient care strategies. Syapse provides case review teams, such as molecular tumor board tools, to capture and deliver actionable guidance for integration into physicians’ clinical workflows.
3. Tracking Outcomes and Costs
Leveraging molecular profiling to improve patient care hinges primarily on the ability to learn from historical patient data. Syapse provides effective tools that enable the assessment of costs and outcomes based on treatment plans guided by the molecular subtypes of diseases.
4. Provide the best decision support for frontline teams
The new molecular targets, diagnostic tests, and therapies in the guidelines will be continuously updated. Syapse can incorporate molecular data into research guidelines to provide targeted treatment guidance for physicians both within and outside the institution.
5. Quality Improvement
Syapse can track the issuance of guidelines, decisions, and outcomes to improve the quality of molecular testing and targeted therapy.
6. Establishing a Data Sharing Network
Shared clinical data will be more robust. By using Syapse, healthcare providers can enhance their diagnostic evidence through a shared network. The network primarily includes patients’ clinical histories, genomic and molecular data, and treatment outcomes.

Syapse Products



Application Platform: Syapse Precision Medicine Platform
Syapse has established a suite of clinical applications designed to help healthcare providers implement and expand the scope of precision medicine.
Syapse Precision Medicine Platform includes core technologies and tools that power clinical applications. By leveraging the platform and its applications, healthcare institutions can rapidly deploy precision medicine in routine clinical care.
Since each service provider may have different clinical priorities, resources, and timelines when establishing precision medicine capabilities, Syapse works closely with clients to define the project scope and deliver professional services such as external connectivity, configuration, and legacy data ingestion.
Its key features include: content interface, management interface, workflow interface, knowledge base management, advanced search, saved queries, semantic database, configurable data model, workflow engine, rules engine, EMR connector, HL7 connector, compatibility workbench, sandbox packaging, and configuration API.

Applications: The Syapse Oncology, The Syapse MDx, The Syapse PGx
1. The Syapse Oncology provides oncologists with molecular profiling data contextualized by patients’ clinical histories. Integration with the platform enables the capture of patient information and molecular profiling data from both internal and external laboratories within the institution’s health IT ecosystem. Healthcare organizations are overcoming the final barriers to precision medicine; by leveraging The Syapse Oncology, institutional oncologists can request guidance from expert panels, select targeted treatment regimens, and enroll patients in molecularly matched clinical trials.
Features: Oncology Care Interface, Test Scheduling, Interactive MDx Reports, Treatment Decision Support, Medication Ordering, Clinical Trial Matching, Trial Enrollment Workflow, Molecular Tumor Board Workflow, Laboratory Integration Portal, Oncology Data Model Templates, Clinical Data Import, Clinical Workflow Integration.

2. The Syapse MDx streamlines the process for clinicians to write molecular diagnostic test reports within hospital-based pathology laboratories. It leverages a rules engine, a knowledge base manager, and platform connectors to integrate clinical information, molecular analysis data, and biomedical knowledge into interactive test reports. With The Syapse MDx, healthcare institutions can provide their physicians with updated information and potential treatment options.
Features: MDx Testing Portal, Inbound Test Order Management, Test Reports, EMR-Integrated Test Orders and Reports, Specimen Workflow, Report Archiving and Updates, MDx Data Model Templates, LIMS Connectors, Analytics Connectors, Interpretation Connectors.

3. When physicians select medications via the electronic health record (EHR), The Syapse PGx enables healthcare institutions to integrate pharmacogenomics knowledge into daily clinical workflows. It leverages the platform’s rules engine to automatically map the complex processes of genetic testing for drug response. Upon medication selection, relevant knowledge is automatically delivered to the EHR to trigger optimal timing alerts. By using The Syapse PGx, healthcare organizations are leveraging molecular data to enhance their clinical service lines within their existing workflows.
Features: Integrated best clinical practice alerts, laboratory integration portal, preloaded best clinical practice guidelines, pharmacogenomics data model templates, haplotype mapping tool workflows, and drug response mapping workflows.

Innovation Support:
1. Syapse commits to ensuring the privacy and security of user data.

• Data Center Security: The Syapse system is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS adheres to the highest industry standards for security and undergoes regular audits of its comprehensive framework, such as SAS 70 and ISO 27001, to ensure security quality.
• User Data Isolation: Syapse mandates independent, single-user deployments for all users, eliminating any possibility of inadvertent data sharing. Furthermore, customers who purchase the compliance package are guaranteed that their data will be stored on dedicated hardware within SWS data centers.
• Data Encryption: All customer data is encrypted; all data in transit uses HTTP connections, and all data at rest is encrypted.
• Activity Audit: All changes to user data generate a complete audit trail.
• Web Application Security: The Syapse application is safeguarded by industry best practices, such as input data validation, CSRF protection, and password encryption.
• Business Continuity: The Syapse platform is resilient and can be restarted within minutes in the event of a disruption. Syapse retains complete customer data and encrypts all backups.
• Independent Audit: The security system was initially based on the results of an ISO 27002 audit, with subsequent security assessments conducted by BiggsB.
• Implementation: The Syapse security management system features a comprehensive set of policies and procedures, which are regularly reviewed by the Company’s Chief Security Officer and executive leadership team.

2. Syapse helps users comply with all applicable laws and regulations related to laboratory accreditation.
Syapse has established safeguards, policies, and procedures to protect patients’ health information in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) enacted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). These measures include:

• Complete the required risk assessment and privacy security assessment;
• Develop a comprehensive set of policies and regulations that directly map to HIPAA administrative, physical, and technical safeguards;
• Implementation of procedural and technical safeguards to prevent Syapse employees from accessing PHI;
• The Chief Security Officer is responsible for monitoring information systems and managing policies and regulations related to information security;
• The Chief Privacy Officer is responsible for ensuring compliance with HIPAA/HITECH regulations and other federal and state privacy-related laws;
• Annual Employee HIPAA Training Course;
• Encrypt protected health information (PHI) during transmission and at rest in accordance with industry security standards;
• Implement audit trail and record retention functions;
• Implement business partner agreements with customers, suppliers, and subcontractors where appropriate;
• Conduct regular assessments of all policies and procedures to ensure that HIPAA/HITECH regulations serve as the overarching guidance.

Profitability and Financing:
Syapse Pricing: Syapse charges annual fees for its various products.
The Syapse Precision Medicine Platform is priced at $200,000, with individual applications priced at $50,000 each. In healthcare institutions, each active user requires one usage package, priced at $4,000 per package.
The company has raised $14.6 million in funding to date.
On January 1, 2011, it secured $1.6 million in angel investment; on January 22, 2013, it raised $3 million in Series A funding from The Social+Capital Partnership; and on July 10, 2014, it closed a $10 million Series B round jointly invested by The Social+Capital Partnership and Safeguard Scientifics.

Team Members:
Syapse boasts a highly sophisticated team comprising physicians, biologists, software engineers, and other top-tier talent from diverse fields. Many team members are graduates of prestigious institutions such as Stanford University, the University of California, UC Davis, Yale University, and UCLA. Some have previously worked at influential companies including Google, 23andMe, and Genentech.

Glenn Winokur, CEO and Co-Founder


Glenn is a veteran with over 25 years of experience in the software industry and founded Syapse in 2008. Early in his career, he worked in sales and support for data management and software development across many highly regulated industries, including healthcare. He was also a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of NetIQ, where he oversaw the supply of security, systems management, and web analytics software, leading the company from its initial product launch in 1996 through its IPO in 1999 to annual revenues of $300 million by 2003. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Marketing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and frequently serves as a guest lecturer and mentor advisor at the University of Illinois and Stanford University.

JONATHAN HIRSCH, President & Founder


Jonathan tightly integrates diagnostics with healthcare service providers, helping users translate problems into solutions. He serves on the Advisory Board of SXSW Accelerator, mentors for the UCSF Start-up Healthcare Course, and is a member of the Free the Data! committee. Early in his career, he worked in the Neuroscience Business Development division at Abbott Laboratories, where he facilitated drug development through strategic partnerships and private equity financing. His research at the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago helped establish mechanisms that promote hippocampal neurogenesis and mitigate the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. He holds a Master of Science in Natural Sciences with a focus on Neuroscience from Stanford University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago.

TONY LOESER, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder


Since 1996, Tony has been applying knowledge and reasoning technologies to biomedical and web applications. After co-founding Syapse, he took charge of software and structured content. Tony previously served as Vice President of Engineering at Tumri, where he applied semantic technologies to targeted online advertising. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University, as well as a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.

(Editor: Zhang Nan)

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