OUR STORY

Morten Venø started his Ph.D. in 2008 at Aarhus University in the RNA biology laboratory directed by Jørgen Kjems. This was around the same time that the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technique was gaining traction in RNA research but the analysis of this data was in its infancy.


Morten, who has always had a keen interest in computers and programming, began establishing bioinformatic pipelines to extract meaningful and interesting information from the raw data.


In 2013, Yan Yan moved to Denmark from China as a Ph.D. student in the Kjem laboratory. Because of Yan’s laboratory expertise and Morten’s analytical innovations, the two developed an invaluable collaboration. Yan’s meticulous sample preparation enabled high quality reads from the smallest and most unconventional samples. The duo quickly gained a reputation as the experts in NGS technology. 


Over the next five years, they were frequently contacted by researchers with a desire to apply NGS technology in their work but lacked the expertise to do so. Either the laboratory work was too complex and expensive or the analysis required a specialist to make sense of raw data already generated. As a result, Morten and Yan have been involved in multiple collaborations and study types as members of the Kjems Laboratory.


Increasingly, Morten and Yan experienced a general demand for NGS as a commercial service. This resulted in the two of them together founding omiics in 2018.