March 12, 2007
Spotfire
Christopher Ahlberg
Founder & CEO
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
The past five years have been years of rapid growth for Spotfire, in large part because pharmaceutical companies have expanded their use beyond research and into clinical and sales and marketing. Others focused on a too narrow aspect of the research process.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
Pharmaceutical companies continue to shift their focus to drug development, and pushing early-stage research to biotechnology and academic collaborators. Genomics and genetics become more common in the context of clinical trials, initially to improve attrition in early stage trials, but eventually leading to personalized medicine.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
Spotfire provides enterprise analytic software and services that are radically faster and more adaptable to different life science data analysis challenges than traditional bio-it and business intelligence tools. Our customers use our software to analyze genetic, genomic, screening, chemistry, ADME-tox, clinical trials, portfolio management, and sales and marketing data, and to make valuable, timely decisions.
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?
In lead discovery, our chemistry services enable our customers to work with the leading cheminformatics vendors, including MDL, Daylight, Cambridgesoft, Accelrys, and Chemaxon. This ensures our software can work with our customers’ choice of chemistry data sources and structure renderers and sketchers. We have also partnered with Scitegic and Inforsense to improve our customers’ data analysis workflows by combining their automated analysis pipelines with our interactive user experience.
In genomics research we’ve partnered with Affymetrix to ensure data from Affy instruments can be easily analyzed in Spotfire, and with Ingenuity and Gene Go to support our customers’ functional analysis of their expression data. We also partner with IBM’s life sciences solutions group.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
Spotfire DXP 1.1, released in January, is a powerful new data analysis product that improves R&D activities such as clinical pharmacology and exploratory development. We have significant initiatives in screening. Many of our customers are working to “industrialize” their high throughput screening operations to increase productivity and quality. We are also working with customers and partners at Cellomics and GE Healthcare to accelerate the analysis of cell-based and high content screening data.
Where do you see your company in five years?
Spotfire expects to be the leading platform for next-generation business intelligence in life sciences.