St. Louis statistical data analysis and consulting services company BioRankings just launched the Beta version of it’s first product. Last year 4thEst8 readers learned how the seven person firm landed a $1.6 million grant to develop a platform to help researchers sort through mounds of data. Now halfway through the grant period, BioRankings has it’s platform up and running, and is working with unpaid clients for their feedback and guidance – but hopes to turn them to paid subscribers after the software is further developed.
Ally McClure, BioRankings Co-Founder
“It’s not.. a slick interface or anything yet, but the ‘meat’ of it is there and that’s a really big deal to us,” co-founder Ally McClure told the 4thEst8. “Our focus is on having the most statistically potent platform technology for analyzing this type of data.”
What kind of data? “Omics”
“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. As a whole, they are studies of some kind of sample where scientists measure something in the sample – looking for how many “somethings” and what kind of “somethings” are in that sample. For genomics it might be the study of your entire genetic makeup – with you being the sample, and the parts of DNA that make up each strand being what is counted. You know, the letters “A, C, T, and G” that you see in a classroom explanation of what makes up DNA.
The BioRankings Beta is focused on metabolomics – the large-scale study of small molecules within cells, bio-fluids, tissues or organisms. But their over-arching goal is to apply their technology to all of the ‘omics’. To that end they’ve formed a strategic partnership with Domino Data Lab, a company that has its own data platform for scientific discovery. CrunchBase says the San Francisco company raised $123 million since its inception in 2013.
“Our biggest challenge… is the ability to take the things that we really know, which is the statistical methodology, and building that up and making sure that we can really streamline it into a customer-facing product,” McClure said. “We’re doing a lot for that right now, we’re doing a lot of interviews… we’re really trying, but this is our first productization. There’s a bit of a learning curve involved.”
BioRankings was founded late in 2007, but officially spun out of the WUSTL School of Medicine in 2013.
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On the 4thEst8:
$1.6M Grant Fuels Startup Expansion
