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There is perhaps no field as exciting and consequential as modern biomedical research. Today, biotech data doubles every seven months, and genomic sequencing costs continue to plummet even as sequencing speed grows exponentially. Seqera is the driving force behind Nextflow, MultiQC, and the Seqera Platform ⎯ technologies that comprise the modern biotech stack. Our software empowers scientists to solve some of today’s most complex and essential challenges in healthcare, from pioneering innovative therapeutics to combating pandemics to helping ensure better patient outcomes.
At Seqera, we are thrilled and honoured to have been shortlisted as finalists for Healthtech Company of the Year by the prestigious 2024 Global Business Technology Awards. Seqera started with Nextflow, an open-source project developed by our founders Paolo Di Tommaso and Evan Floden at Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in 2013 to solve complex problems with genomic analysis workflows. Nextflow has grown into a solution used by tens of thousands of bioinformaticians, clinicians, and data scientists worldwide.
Since our commercial launch in 2018, Seqera has enjoyed rapid adoption in the biotech and healthtech communities. With over 20,000 active daily users and >160,000 monthly downloads, Nextflow has emerged as a de facto standard in biomedical research. A key reason for Seqera’s success is nf-core, a community effort sponsored by Seqera to develop a curated set of high-quality analysis pipelines used by researchers worldwide.
Nextflow and the nf-core project have attracted attention from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and have been awarded multiple grants under CZI’s Essential Open Scientific Software (EOSS) program for contributions to open science. In a 2023 community survey of bioinformatics professionals, 99% of respondents expressed satisfaction with Nextflow — an almost unheard-of acceptance for open-source software efforts.
In 2022, Seqera’s technology emerged as pivotal in the global fight against COVID-19 as governments and public health authorities, including the Genomics UK Consortium (COG-19), scrambled to increase their genomics surveillance capabilities. Nextflow became an essential tool because of its ubiquity, ease of deployment, cross-cloud compatibility, and rich collection of proven analysis pipelines, enabling governments worldwide to get overnight identification of new COVID-19 variants. Seqera’s software helped identify the Alpha variant, for example.
Today, over 150 leading biotechnology companies, including 11 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies, use Seqera. These include household names such as AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Oxford Nanopore. Applications range from genetic surveillance to AI-powered medical imaging to developing early-stage immunogenetic vaccines to genomics data analysis for personalized medicine.
Evan Floden, CEO and co-founder of Seqera, reflects, “It is a great honour to be shortlisted by the GBTA as a candidate for Healthtech Company of the Year. This recognition is gratifying to our entire team at Seqera and a testament to the tireless efforts of thousands of Nextflow and nf-core users and contributors worldwide. Over the past decade, having a front-row seat to the tremendous medical advances enabled by improved genomics analysis techniques has been a privilege. We can hardly wait to see what exciting developments the next decade will bring!”
