Date: Jun 03, 2010 Source: bizjournals (
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GnuBio is a new Harvard University spinout that is poised to become an "eBay of Biomarkers," according to founder John Boyce. Boyce, who spent several years at Cambridge-based genome sequencer Helicos Biosciences Corp., has joined with Harvard professor of physics and engineering Dave Weitz and Jessica Tonani, former associate director of product marketing for Santa Clara, Calif.-based gene sequencing company Affymetrix Inc., to create a company that is part genome sequencing, part database management, part social network. It promises to join together millions of biologicial samples that are currently siloed at institutes around the world, and to do it using an open source platform.
The company currently works out of Weitz' lab at Harvard and has licensed a suite of intellectual property from Harvard that, together with other intellectual property Boyce brought to the table, enables the company's business model. Boyce said the company is currently considering term sheets from venture capital firms and will likely announce a Series A round in the next few weeks. Boyce declined to say how large he expected the raise to be, or how many firms might make up the syndicate. The company has sold the first two prototypes of its gene sequencer, which, at $45,000, is significantly cheaper than others currently available commercially.
But the hardware is just the first step. Boyce says the company will approach institutes with an enticing offer. "We will sell you these cheap systems, or sequence your samples ourselves, but there is a catch. After a certain time period has elapsed, you have to give us those samples for our open source database," Boyce said.
Boyce said the company will convince institutes to join in the old fashioned way - threats. "We'll say, well, your competition is using this and they'll have their sequences sooner and be able to capitalize on any biomarkers they find."
Biomarkers are gene mutations that are correlated with a certain type of a disease, and increasingly, they are being used to develop drugs that work well for one specific patient population. The discovery of a biomarker can be a goldmine for an academic institution, which can out-license the research to a pharmaceutical company.
Once the database collects all these samples, it will mine them for any biomarker discoveries, or "hits." Then an alert will be sent to all those who have access to the database, including big pharmaceutical companies. The drug companies can then call up the technology transfer office at the university or institute and offer to license the research. In that case, the university would get 80 percent and GnuBio would get the other 20 percent.
As for privacy concerns, Boyce said that when patients give over samples to one institution -- for instance, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute -- the consent form usually includes language saying that it could be used "for any biological research Dana-Farber sees fit" and the sample no longer belongs to the patient once the consent form has been signed. Boyce said the company is assembling an Institutional Review Board that will take extreme care to make sure all health privacy laws are adhered to.
Boyce said the company's name was chosen in part to associate it with the free software project Gnu (pronounced Ga-new), and partly because the "new" sound is associated with the commonly used name for startups, "New Co."
Boyce said he knows the lifespan of this technology won't be more than four or five years, until something better comes along. But, he says, GnuBio has come up with a way to have an afterlife. The company has been in discussions with disease foundations to help create social networks of people who have donated samples for research. Each donor would have an anonymous webpage that would receive an alert each time their sample is used to research and would enable donors to communicate with each other.
