How does cloud storage promote cancer research? Look at "Scientists + Programmers" entrepreneurial program

Earlier this year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his ambition to turn New York into another start-up centre tied to Silicon Valley, and Biotech is one of the most important cards in the world, and it has a lot to do with the ability to research and the universities. These days I met Histowiz from the New York Biotechnology lab, a tissue pathology service provider, founder Ke Cheng, a cancer research expert with a PhD from Cornell University and Harvard Medical School. The company was the first to be voted on at the MIT figuratively Show Day event last weekend. It can be said to represent the characteristics of the outstanding start-up companies in New England: strong technical background and focus on solving the difficult problems in scientific research.

Histowiz's current business model is to work with universities, as well as with laboratories of biopharmaceutical companies, to obtain samples of their guinea pig tissues, to use automated tissue scanners imported from Japan, and to process them with a set of normative processes, including embedding, excision, staining, and so on, and eventually digitization of these specimens, and placed in the clouds. Histowiz refined a set of their own process, they obtained the guinea pig specimen from the research institute and spent three days to complete the whole process, after which the specimens would be converted into a high definition vector graphic format stored in the cloud, and the university could obtain this information free of charge, and the biopharmaceutical companies would pay a certain fee.

In the current field of cancer research, laboratories remain largely separate. This situation will result in a lot of scientists ' energy is not put on the interpretation of the specimen such a real outcome of the process, but in the process of organizing, making specimens such a repetitive monotonous work. Even in these matters, researchers are less productive than professional craftsmen, which is a huge waste of their time. And, because the laboratory is not communicated with each other, so the phenomenon of repeated treatment of the same specimens and so on is widespread. At the same time, it also represents the need for each laboratory to purchase its own equipment, to purchase reactants and organize equipment, to recruit its own technicians, and even to find dedicated IT personnel to assist in the processing and publication of the results of the trials. Histowiz is equivalent to saving a large sum of money for all laboratories and the cost of spending time. And the specimens stored on the cloud can be seen anywhere. Histowiz founder and CEO Ke Cheng sent me a show link that you can see here (http://s3.amazonaws.com/histowiz-public/viewer/ sample.html), all of the samples can be arbitrarily scaled, the clarity of the scientific papers can be published in the level of photos, and almost no lag, it is really magical.

The Internet we know today is not because people want to go to Facebook, it's not because people want to use Google search, but because Professor Tim Lee wants to share their academic achievements with research institutions around the world. The invention of the Internet indeed played a role, and now because of the cloud, not only to obtain information can be achieved anytime, even download the data these steps can be dispensed with. General clinical research Institutions (or commissioned research institutions, CRM, that is, contract study from, are some of the enterprises engaged in research and development activities for large pharmaceutical companies) have a specific server, these servers can not permanently store data, It is therefore not possible to require their customers to download regularly and to view the data from any time and place. From this perspective, Amazon's cloud services do open up a new area for startups today. This equates to a permanent collection of all research results in the cloud, with little need for backup, change, or storage. Yesterday when I was on the phone with Ke, she was New York at Amazon's annual cloud services conference. Amazon's "cloud Convention" is held in 12 large cities around the world, not only in the traditional entrepreneurial hubs of New York, London and San Francisco, but also in the emerging markets of São Paulo, Singapore and India, as well as the famous "Silicon Valley of India" Bangalore. Startups like Histowiz, using Amazon's cloud services, can do much more to cut costs than they could have done in the past with the power of a single company.

Ke told me she felt her character was a bit like the former draughtsman who made the charts. Although this metaphor seems to have little to do with biological research, it is very interesting. Columbus and his younger brother, who had been the draftsman, had played a crucial role in the discovery of the great sea in Europe. In Seville and Lisbon in 16th century, as long as explorers return from their voyages, their latest achievements will be updated by the hard work of the cartographic craftsmen to the new version of the map to help the next couple's adventures. Because it is impossible for a single seeker to explore the shape of the whole continent, the continuous efforts of a group of explorers, coupled with the rapid updating of the latest nautical information by the drafters, have made the entire human knowledge base rapidly expanding.

The Cancer research project, by contrast, is somewhat similar to that. The common denominator of these two projects is that they are huge, extremely informative tasks. As a result, it is almost impossible to overcome these difficulties alone by any single explorer or individual researcher, but it will take thousands of scientists to collaborate. In such a huge system, the information sharing mechanism becomes one of the central systems, and what Histowiz want to do is to establish the information-sharing central system of cancer research.

And the rise of the GitHub model in recent years has also inspired many entrepreneurs in other industries. They are using social networking as a model for creative applications and using it to collaborate on the scientific process. Since programming is one of the most direct areas of internet relations, it is normal for this model to be first implemented among programmers, and now it is starting to expand as well. Histowiz was founded at the beginning of its biological hardware as the core business, in the future it also intends to establish a social network between scientific research institutions, and promote the development of research and open source, the establishment of a "scientist version of the GitHub", and even expand the audience beyond the scientific community.

PostScript

I'm so interested in this company, and because it's a real start-up that really fits the vision of the "Software-eating World" presented by Marc Andreessen, because it's ideally integrated across domains, and uses internet-based and software solutions to succeed in other areas. To address these areas of immediate urgency. That is why we say that where existing industries are at the crossroads of the most likely entrepreneurial opportunities.

Such a company, ideally, would be half a biomedical expert and the other half a computer engineer. Ke told me that she now has a team of experts in various fields, but until further progress in financing, only she is now full-time in the company, now she can only be a scientist, and as a programmer, but also to find investors. Although it is relatively early, but I have confidence in the future of Histowiz.

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)