Champions 2.0

March 12, 2007

Leschly

Feliciano

How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?

In general terms, a changing economic climate impacts Ingenuity Systems through our customers’ ability to buy our products and our ability to access capital if needed. Our response to corporate consolidation, expense management, and shrinking NIH budgets has been to put forth a strong product offering with a demonstrated ability to drive increased productivity and hope that it puts us “first in line” for the funds and thus lessen the impact of economic climate changes. With regard to accessing private capital, we have been fortunate to be able to maintain a high level of investment in our technology and products through strong product sales and thus have not had the need to access private capital during the difficult times.

What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?

I believe that one of the most important challenges we face is to bring our ability to understand biological systems on par with our ability to perform empirical observations of these systems. We have done a fantastic job over the past 10 years developing high-throughput technologies and experimental platforms, so our challenge is to now develop the capability to scaleably analyze and derive biological understanding from this data and translate these investments into better medicines and diagnostics, improved R&D productivity, and improved patient care on a global scale.

What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?

Ingenuity offers a suite of products and services with one goal in mind: To provide complete solutions that enable our customers to analyze and understand their data within a biological framework.

We have developed Ingenuity Pathways Analysis (IPA), which is a software solution that enables researchers to model, analyze and understand the complex biological systems at the core of life science research. IPA has been adopted in virtually all stages of the drug discovery and development process from target identification and validation to clinical biomarker discovery, molecular toxicology, and pharmacogenomics.

Outside of IPA, we also have a comprehensive set of scientific and professional services in addition to selling key “slices” of our highly structured, detail-rich biological content.

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?

Ingenuity has been fortunate to forge strong partnerships with companies like Affymetrix, Millennium, Spotfire, Partek, Genespring, Rosetta, and many others to develop our solution and seamlessly integrate it into the workflow of our customers. We are also very proud to have partnered in one way or another with all of the global top 20 pharmaceutical companies and most leading academic institutions, but our most valued partners are the thousands of individual researchers who use our products and services on a daily basis and who generously share their feedback, ideas, and scientific insights with us so we can continually improve on what we deliver. 

What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?

We continue to invest very heavily in enhancing the scientific content, algorithms, and visualization of our solution. One of the most interesting initiatives is in the area of biomarkers where we recently released phase one of the initiative. To enable this solution, we have been manually curating chemistry information in addition to biological pathway data for the past 7 years. This content is now available to the end users of our pathways solution for the first time. However, broad and deep content is only one aspect of our biomarker solution. Powerful software, algorithms, and interactive visualization tools are other pivotal elements that bring the maximum benefit to biomarker researchers. The biomarker initiative will enable a fundamentally new approach for the discovery and validation of predictive and diagnostic biomarkers in both research and clinical contexts. This is only one example of how Ingenuity Systems expects our computation systems biology solutions to enable fundamentally new approaches and create new paradigms for understanding and managing health and disease.

Where do you see your company in five years?

In five years we hope to have played an important role in broadly enabling the use of computational solutions to understand biological systems, and to have impacted general scientific progress and productivity in the drug discovery and development process in a positive and material way. By delivering on our mission to improve human health through the understanding of biological mechanisms we also hope to have demonstrated that investment in bioinformatics can be exceptionally lucrative, and thus help drive further investment in this important area of science.