Quadria Capital announces strategic investment into Strand Life Sciences

New Delhi: Quadria Capital, Asia’s leading healthcare-focused private equity investor, has announced its strategic investment into Strand Life Sciences, a global bioinformatics company and India’s integrated and specialized diagnostic company. India-based Healthquad Fund and Singapore-based Heritas Venture Fund also co-invested, along-side Quadria.

Strand Life Sciences in its new form is a business combination of Strand and Triesta, which brings together strong, global bioinformatics and clinical research capabilities with a pan-India presence in specialised and routine diagnostics services. The investment in Strand Life Sciences will allow Quadria to support the expansion of the company into Asia’s leading, integrated, specialised diagnostic company, and a leading provider of bioinformatics and research services worldwide.

Founded in 2000 as a spin-off from the Indian Institute of Science, Strand is one of the pioneers in the bioinformatics space, with proprietary data analytical engines for research and clinical applications. Its customers include leading instrument companies, like Agilent, pharmaceutical companies, diagnostics laboratories, and research laboratories. It has over 200 engineers and scientists and performs cutting-edge diagnostic tests for more than 300 hospitals in the country.

Triesta Sciences, founded in 2002 was until the merger, the diagnostic unit of Healthcare Global Enterprises Ltd., India’s leading network of cancer care and reproductive medicine centres, offers comprehensive oncology diagnostics, biomarker and translational research, laboratory services, and clinical research services.

The combination positions the new Strand Life Sciences uniquely with end-to-end capabilities in precision medicine – a complete range of clinical diagnostic offerings, proprietary analytics, access to India’s largest cancer bio-repository, and strong R&D capabilities to drive costs down and keep pace with the rapidly evolving world of precision medicine.

The clinical diagnostic offerings of Strand will be focussed on oncology, reproductive medicine, rare disease, infectious diseases and preventive care. On the bio-informatics side, the company will focus on growing its business of driving efficiency for global instrument providers and diagnostic laboratories using its proprietary tools and services. The company will also focus on using the bio-bank to drive collaborations with pharmaceutical companies for drug development.

Quadria Capital Managing Partner and Co-Founder Dr Amit Varma said: “The demand for specialized diagnostics has been rising rapidly across the region. With diagnostics moving beyond just identification of infections to becoming an integral part of management and therapy, we see a huge potential in this area. Quadria is very excited to partner with Strand in this unique diagnostic platform that provides a potent combination of world-class bio-informatics genomics research and integrated specialised diagnostics.”

The specialised diagnostics market is one of the fastest growing segments of the Indian diagnostic industry and is expected to be over US$ 700 million by 2020.

HCG Chairman and CEO, Dr B.S. Ajai Kumar said: “The future of medicine is personalised, precision and preventive. We are excited to convert our long-standing association into a partnership that will offer the most comprehensive set of diagnostic technologies and focus on redefining precision medicine. In an era of data-driven healthcare, Strand’s exceptional team of computer and life scientists with access to a well annotated clinical substrate, provides a unique opportunity to create exceptional value.”

Strand Life Sciences CEO Dr Ramesh Hariharan said: “Given their deep operating knowledge and experience of building healthcare businesses in Asia, the partnership with Quadria and HCG will help launch Strand into its next phase of growth and into an era where data analytics and molecular measurements together change diagnosis and treatment paradigms.”

This marks Quadria’s second consecutive investment in the diagnostic sector, after having announced its partnership with Malaysia’s leading diagnostic company- Lablink, last month.