NEWARK — ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute’s software has quietly set the standard for analyzing gene editing in cells and now the health system is spinning it out in its own company.

The company, dubbed DECODR Inc., now sells subscriptions to a software tool that will help scientists understand what happens to DNA after it’s edited. DECODR has five employees and is based out of the Delaware Technology Park’s incubator at the University of Delaware’s STAR campus in Newark.

The company’s name is an acronym, short for: Deconvolution of Complex DNA Repair. Its origins trace back to the gene-editing method CRISPR, a tool used to precisely locate, edit, disable and modify specific genes in genes.

The revolutionary technology behind the work has changed the course of precision medicine and, until recent technological developments, it took time for scientists to understand how CRISPR affects a genetic sequence. It could have taken up to 45 minutes per sample to analyze in the past, and the results may not be accurate.

Now, through the DECODR software, an analysis can be done within seconds, according to company officials. It also can produce an interactive analysis that shows mutation types, statistics and breakdowns of what percentage of the cell population has a mutation.

Eric Kmiec, the co-founder of DECODR and executive director of ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute, describes it like pulling apart wet pages in a book.

“The pages are overlapping and you can’t read it. DECODR will pull it apart and you can get the pages dry and then you can read it,” he said. “It’s in the name: it’s a decoder.”

The software was first developed in 2019 by Rohan Kanchana, then a Newark Charter School junior, who talked his way into an internship at the institute. He was inspired to develop a computer program to help understand how CRISPR works and simplify the analysis process. ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute Associate Director of Technology Development Pawel Bialk coached him in understanding the science behind it to help “translate” results into a useful program.

The ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute had the results published in “The CRISPR Journal” and that’s when the scientific world took notice.

“We started to see a lot of traffic internationally, actually pretty quickly after that. Since then it’s been a matter of enhancing it in small ways over the years, but it’s really stood the test of time,” Bialk said.

The DECODR program has been validated by three scientific programs and has been used by 5,000 registered users across universities, for-profit companies and nonprofit research organizations. Company officials said that there’s a surprising uptick in agricultural biotech studies, since DECODR has unique capabilities for that sector that other competitors lack.

ChristianaCare is a “founding owner” of the company, though Kmiec declined to comment directly on the amount of the investment. Founding shareholders also include Kmiec, Bialk and Kanchana, who graduated from MIT and now serves as DECODR’s chief software engineer.

DECODR’s board of directors includes Kmiec, Kanchana and ChristianaCare Chief Legal Counsel Christian Bauer.