March 12, 2007
GeneGo
Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya
CSO, President and Founder of GeneGo
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
GeneGo Inc. is positioned for success as we have grown organically and added new employees when we have had the revenue to do so. The company is privately held and profitable. We have a strong product line that leads innovation in systems biology, pharmacology and pathway analysis, resulting in continual growth for the past four years.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
We see continued growth in the systems biology marketplace, and we will see a new systems pharmacology market develop as well as expansion and finally ROI in toxicogenomics. Systems biology modeling is also becoming popular.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
MetaBase has high-quality content with expansive coverage for complete systems biology, not just genes and proteins but also hormones, compounds, transcriptional factors, metabolites etc. MetaCore is the most comprehensive easy-to-use pathway analysis platform that can concurrently visualize multiple “’omics” data and build metabolic and signaling networks for human, mouse, rat, dog, worm, chicken, yeast and chimpanzee. MetaDrug has unique abilities to represent compounds as groups of genes and provide. Compound structures are uploaded, metabolites predicted, and a thorough understanding of what pathways these compounds are involved in and what targets they are hitting is accessible. In our easy-to-use two-click workflow, a complete analysis of toxicity, relevant diseases, and functional process of the compounds can be calculated to compare compounds. MapEditor allows users to build their own pathway map representations using the MetaCore content back-end, and once these new maps are published they can be included in statistical analysis and visualization of experimental data.
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?
Elsevier MDL, as together we provide the unique ability for researchers to understand what pathways compounds are involved in, what targets they are hitting, and whether similar compounds have been patented and are in clinical trials.
Our integration with Spotfire provides the unique ability to analyze genomics and compound data in Decision Site and the MetaCore MetaDrug environment. This is a powerful two-way integration.
Invitrogen uses GeneGo’s pathway maps to inform their customers of what products -- such as clones, reagents and antibodies -- they can purchase.
For gene expression analysis we have integrated with Rosetta Biosoftware, Genedata, and Genespring.
For hardware we have partnered with ABI, Affymetrix, Agilent and Illumina. We have a unique tissue filter that we have developed with ABI which includes the best quality tissue available.
For workflows we partner with Inforsense and Scitegic. We have developed easy to use workflows for our mutual customers.
In translational medicine, we work with Xenobase, which is used to house clinical trial information, histology, pathology and microarray data that can be visualized and analyzed within the MetaCore environment.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
GeneGo’s MetaTox Consortium will be developing content and tools that are going to really turn toxicgenomics around. We will be developing unique GeneGo functional descriptors that will leverage the mounds of toxicogenomics data in pharma and provide value by potentially reducing the number of compounds failing due to human tox issues. We will be able to “front load” risk.
Where do you see your company in five years?
Based on our current growth curve, GeneGo will probably have twice as many employees as we are on a big recruiting drive at the moment based on an extremely successful 2006. Our product line is strong and we have other products and ideas in the works. We also plan to continue being the innovator and leader in this space. We were recently recognized as having the strongest Competitive Strategy in this marketplace by Frost and Sullivan, who evaluated 150 other companies and talked to life scientists for their impressions. GeneGo won based on having scientific expertise in top management, a strong pipeline, our partnering philosophy and our strong patent position.