A small St. Louis company that provides statistical data analysis and consulting services just landed a $1.6 million grant.
They’re developing analysis methods and tools to help researchers quickly sort through mounds of data.
“It allows us to hire more statisticians to do this work and focus on this specific problem,” BioRankings co-founder Ally McClure told the 4thEst8. “We had five full time employees. We hired two statisticians. We now have seven people (who are) full time.”
The grant comes from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. It’s a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant. Funding this Phase II means that the NIGMS believes the initial work BioRankings did in Phase I (for which they paid $225,000) shows scientific and technical merit, and has commercial potential.
The company expects that software resulting from the work they do with this Phase II grant will help metabolomics (the large-scale study of small molecules) researchers speed up the analysis of raw data by quickly producing lists of clinically relevant metabolites based on validated statistical methods.
“With this Phase II we will further develop the statistical an annotation tools while testing them on real data in conjunction with research collaborators at Washington University School of Medicine and other researcher labs,” BioRankings co-founder Bill Shannon, Ph.D. said.
BioRankings was founded late in 2007, but officially spun of of the WUSTL School of Medicine in 2013. The company is developing a platform technology to help a wide array of researchers perform validated statistical tests on both single and multi-omics studies, including integration with covariates.
De-jargoning: A courtesy of the 4thEst8
Generally speaking, covariates are characteristics of the participants in a study… but it’s more scientific than that. Regardless, adding a covariate to a model may increase the accuracy of the study. “Omics” is sciency jargon that refers to various disciplines in biology whose names end in the suffix -omics, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and glycomics. Use it in a conversation and blow someone’s mind.
