Health IT, Pharma, Startups

Biotech companies feel the need for speed: Cue big data analytics startups

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.

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.

The task of finding pharmaceutical pricing data is a challenge because it’s spread around the Web in various forms in different languages with few ways of knowing how recent that information is. RXData aggregates the complex realtime pricing information in a centralized platform using data extraction software to minimize the time it takes to find the data. So far its customers are Kowa and Navigant. In an interview with Joe Segal, the CTO and co-founder, he said although the company doesn’t have a direct competitor, Context Matters is probably the closest but Context is focused more on reimbursement issues.

Segal said there are a lot of things the company is looking at in the way of new development, including interactive timelines companies could view for drug development and by therapeutic area.

 

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