2:19 pm by Stephanie Baum
Biotech companies are looking for ways to speed up drug discovery and pharmaceutical companies need an easier way to find accurate drug pricing information to make their businesses more competitive. So two big data analytics companies graduating from Blueprint Health’s accelerator have taken a cue from Maverick and Goose. One offers a way to shrink the amount of time genome analysis takes and another developed a way to make it easier for drug companies to find global drug price data in real time.
Stirplate.io was founded by a former hacker turned neuroscientist Keith Gonzales. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a scientist who is nicknamed “the freight train” and judging by the laughter that greeted this introduction from Blueprint Health Demo Day attendees, they hadn’t either. It’s derived from the guy’s zeal to get things done and the intensity behind that. He pointed out that more than half of the scientists working in genomics don’t have the knowledge to analyze their own data. So he developed a way to shrink the time that it takes to do this analysis from months to hours.
He pointed out that there’s a big market for this kind of analysis — 260,000 labs working on big data spend $35,000 per year for analysis. So far it’s added Columbia and North Carolina State University as paid customers and is in talks with Harvard, Cornell, MIT and Texas A&M University. Although much of its work is on the academic side of research, it is also working with pharma companies. It’s also collaborating with Google’s genomics team.
