St. Louis statistical data analysis and consulting services company BioRankings just got a ‘letter of intent to fund’ from the National Institutes of Health, NEARLY promising the award of a Phase I SBIR grant to the tune of $230,000.
Tommie Pierson Jr., BioRankings Dir. of Business Development
“This will take us in a new direction, allowing us to do some statistical innovative work in the area of Internet of medical things, specifically” said Tommie Pierson Jr., BioRankings Director of Business Development. “We are partnering with the Washington University School of Medicine neo-natal intensive care unit where they are placing tiny sensors on babies to record things like heart rate, temperature, respiration rate. All of this data is being streamed and combined.”
They’re looking at how to use that data to immediately detect, and even predict upcoming, problems with the baby so a medical team can jump into action.
“I’ve never seen a letter of intent not followed with an award,” Co-founder and Managing Partner Bill Shannon told the 4thEst8. “This clears us to start the work.”
The seven person company got its start in the Washington University, St. Louis, School of Medicine in 2007 but officially spun out in 2013 to develop software to help researchers sort through mounds of data. A $1.6 million grant in 2019 led to a Beta launch this spring of a platform focusing on ‘metabolomics’ – the large-scale study of small molecules within cells, bio-fluids, tissues or organisms.
That’s just a start, though, because Co-founder Ally McClure says BioRankings has the over-arching goal of applying its technology to all of the ‘omics’: genomics, proteomics, glycomics – the works! (Essentially they’re all studies of some kind of sample where scientists measure something in the sample – like ‘how many needles are there in that haystack?’ or ‘what is that mouse’s red blood cell count?’)
Milestones:
This spring 4thEst8 readers learned that BioRankings partnered with San Francisco scientific discovery data platform giant Domino Data Lab. Concurrently they launched their Beta, working with unpaid clients for their feedback and guidance. The idea is to turn them into paid subscribers when the software is further developed.
Links:
On the 4thEst8:
$1.6M grant fuels data analysis startup expansion
