March 12, 2007
Active Motif Inc.
Christopher Hoover |
| Hoover |
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| Leon |
TimeLogic Product Manager
Darryl Leon
AKS Product Manager
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
As genomics became more mainstream, a broader range of scientists required tools to manipulate, search and compare sequence data. Active Motif’s TimeLogic team answered this demand with CodeQuest, a powerful biocomputing workstation that includes 1 or 2 FPGA-based accelerator cards and a suite of accelerated algorithms. Priced under $25,000 for academics, CodeQuest is the most affordable TimeLogic product ever released. It drives BLAST, Smith-Waterman, HMM, intron/exon mapping, and oligo searches with the performance of hundreds of CPUs, yet fits on your desk.
CodeQuest will soon be enhanced with PipeWorks, a visual interface that enables you to easily connect bioinformatics tools, filters and analysis steps without programming. This unique combination of intuitive workflow design and computing power will let any scientist build and execute complex bioinformatics analyses.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
The life science market will always demand effective solutions for basic research, however the newly emerging diagnostics arena will require more customized tools and instruments — plus integrated high content assays, intuitive software and high-performance computing systems — to rapidly analyze data obtained from a variety of heterogeneous samples. Active Motif is building and acquiring technology in these domains to ensure that we can provide comprehensive, integrated solutions.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
Active Motif’s focus on cell biology led to our partnership with Bioalma, a bioinformatics software company in Madrid, Spain. Bioalma develops AKS2, a knowledge mining system, which is designed for identifying novel relationships in the published literature that can support drug discovery research. The AKS2 system is marketed, distributed, and supported by Active Motif, and is an excellent complement to the TimeLogic biocomputing systems. As an example, once a collection of genes has been identified from a high-throughput sequence analysis workflow using CodeQuest, researchers can leverage AKS2’s advanced text-mining tools to explore how these genes are related to diseases, drugs, and other genes in the published literature.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
The TimeLogic biocomputing products dramatically extend our customers’ research computing budgets. For instance, our CodeQuest workstation costs less to acquire than the electricity required to power and cool a 64-CPU cluster for just 1 year. CodeQuest and our scalable DeCypher solutions deliver a strategic advantage in operational costs as well as search speed, usability and throughput.
We are excited to apply TimeLogic’s FPGA engineering expertise to next-generation sequencing initiatives. The combination of reduced sequencing cost and low-overhead computing makes intensive metagenomic projects — and ultimately the $1000 genome — much more feasible.
Where do you see your company in five years?
Active Motif will continue to develop both cell biology assays and biocomputing tools for disease-based research. By combining wetlab and computational tools into research workflows, our customers will be able to ask more holistic questions as they elucidate complex systems in biology.