Omicia, whose stated mission is to help researchers and clinicians understand and apply the most relevant information from next-generation sequencing data to improve disease management and medical outcomes, has acquired Spiral Genetics for an undisclosed price.

The deal includes Spiral’s population-specific reference genome and “lossless data compression,” which the companies said enable original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data. The acquisition is expected to enrich Omicia’s trademarked Opal clinical genomics software platform with Spiral’s secondary next-generation sequencing analysis and structural variant capabilities.

Omicia technology has been used by more than a thousand research institutions and clinical labs, company executives assert. The work includes population sequencing initiatives such as Genomics England; national reference laboratories such as LabCorp; and health systems and hospitals that include University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego.

“Access to Omicia’s diverse customer base, global market position and market-leading platform will help us define the future of healthcare,” Adina Mangubat, CEO of Spiral Genetics, said in a statement.

Spiral customers are clinical laboratories, life science companies and sequencing programs. The company employs graph-based technology, which is designed to enable accurate detection of structural variants and provide population-scale data-mining capabilities.

Omicia executives see the deal as providing its customers with opportunities to develop new diagnostics and efficiently manage long-term genomic data storage.

“By removing the need to access multiple software platforms, we improve quality, accuracy and turnaround time, removing major roadblocks to clinical adoption,” Omicia CEO Matt Tindall said in a statement. He added that Spiral also brings to Omicia “a team of commercial leaders, computer scientists and computational biologists with deep expertise in large-scale genome analysis and algorithm development.”

Omicia offers a range of NGS analysis capabilities intended to support high- throughput panels, exomes and whole genomes for identification of hereditary diseases and somatic cancer, delivering clinical reports straight into electronic medical record workflows.