Insilicos Awarded $1 Million Grant for Biotech Services
Seattle, 30 August 2007 - Insilicos today announced that the National Human Genome Research Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health) has awarded the company a $1 million grant to develop biotech services, primarily for drug research. Insilicos will be collaborating in this work with two prominent Seattle organizations: the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), and Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.
The grant will fund Insilicos to enhance software developed by the ISB, and modify it to run as a web service on computers provided to Insilicos virtually through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Using this software, Insilicos will provide services to biomedical researchers, such as drug developers. Insilicos will also use the software in ongoing development of the company’s diagnostic products.
The software is known as the Trans Proteomic Pipeline (TPP), and was developed as open source software at the Institute for Systems Biology with federal funds from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. "We are excited that the TPP will be supported by Insilicos to make it easier for researchers to perform these kinds of experiments," said ISB co-founder Dr. Ruedi Aebersold. "The goal is to move results to the clinic as quickly as possible, where we can diagnose and treat disease."
Insilicos thinks web services will deliver a decisive advantage. “Nobody wants to install and manage complex software systems if they don’t have to,” explains Insilicos vice president of Informatics Brian Pratt. “Salesforce.com proved that for salespeople. In our experience it’s just as true for biologists.” This type of service, called Cloud Computing or Software as a Service has been primarily applied to business applications, but Pratt contends it’s equally applicable to scientific applications. “Researchers have the same need for efficiency as any business.”
Using the software as a web service also facilitates collaboration. “There is a huge need for collaboration tools in biotech research,” notes Insilicos president Erik Nilsson. “In biotech, collaborations between different organizations are the norm. But there are no tools to help people do that for this kind of research. The great thing about this project is, we give people a more efficient way to work at a lower cost, you can scale it up whenever you want, and you don’t need to buy any hardware to get started.”
Insilicos LLC provides services for biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. For more information, visit the Insilicos web site www.insilicos.com or contact Insilicos at info@insilicos.com.
The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is an internationally renowned, non-profit research institute headquartered in Seattle and dedicated to the study and application of systems biology. Founded by Leroy Hood, Alan Aderem, and Ruedi Aebersold, ISB seeks to unravel the mysteries of human biology and identify strategies for predicting and preventing diseases such as cancer, diabetes and AIDS. ISB's systems approach integrates biology, computation and technological development, enabling scientists to analyze all elements in a biological system rather than one gene or protein at a time. Founded in 2000, the Institute has grown to 13 faculty and more than 200 staff members; an annual budget of more than $25 million; and an extensive network of academic and industrial partners. For more information about ISB, visit www.systemsbiology.org.
Amazon Web Services empowers software developers with the tools and support to innovate and build businesses that leverage Amazon's technology platform using standard web services technologies. Amazon Web Services provides developers the opportunity to replace existing infrastructure and scale up or down based on resource demands. This flexibility allows developers to run their businesses at "web-scale"--uninhibited by growth.. For more information, visit aws.amazon.com.
Insilicos LLC is a biomarker discovery and diagnostic development company, concentrating on cardiovascular disease.
For more information, visit the Insilicos web site www.insilicos.com or contact Insilicos at info@insilicos.com. 'Insilicos' 'PreClue," and 'Life Science Software' are trademarks of Insilicos LLC.
