Flagship Pioneering on Tuesday announced the launch of Quotient Therapeutics, which will use a proprietary somatic genomics platform to help it discover treatments by dredging up new links between genes and disease. The startup kicks off with an initial $50-million investment from Flagship to advance the technology and pursue a pipeline that spans therapeutic areas and modalities."We started Quotient to study the natural genetics library inside every tissue, discover gene variants that are beneficial, neutral, or disease-causing, and to harness that knowledge to develop the medicines of tomorrow," said Quotient CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn, who is also a general partner at Flagship.The platform, developed at Flagship Labs over the last two years, is based on single-molecule, genome sequencing technology to reveal the extensive variation encoded in the somatic genome at "unprecedented resolution," according to the companies. The technology allows the study of natural selection at the cellular level through phenotyping, isolation, single-cell genotyping and computation; in turn identifying genes, proteins, and pathways as potential targets.Flagship says the approach will allow Quotient to develop "first-in-class drugs" in areas such as immune, cardiometabolic, infectious, neurodegenerative and rare diseases, as well as cancer and aging. According to the startup's website, its approach does not constrain it to any one modality, noting that somatic genomics can be used to build anything from small-molecule drugs to antibodies, antisense oligonucleotides, "and beyond.""Already, we've created the world's largest somatic genomes dataset, demonstrated the applicability of our platform to multiple therapeutic areas, and translated our genetic discoveries into drug discoveries," remarked Quotient co-founder and president Jacob Rubens.