Winners from a £10m competition to help businesses develop new technology to map and analyse genes have been announced.

Eight companies were successful and will share a total of £1.6m. The winners will use this funding from phase 1 of the competition to demonstrate the technical feasibility of their innovative proposals or early stage prototypes that will help to treat rare diseases and cancer.

A further £8m will be made available in phase 2 of the competition to those companies who are judged to have the best products once they have been developed and tested.

The successful companies are:

• Aridhia Informatics Limited;
• Arkivum Limited;
• Congenica Limited;
• Eagle Genomics Limited;
• Genomics Limited (2 successful bids);
• Omixon Gene Technology;
• Oxford Gene Technology;
• Seven Bridges Genomics UK Limited.

The competition, funded by the Department of Health through the Small Business Research Initiative and managed by Genomics England, supports the efforts to map 100,000 whole genomes (or entire DNA) of NHS patients with cancer or a rare disease by 2017.

The products developed as part of this competition will help to play an important part in reaching this goal.