InSilico Genomics said this week that it has raised €1.2 million ($1.5 million) from private investors which it will use to develop new capabilities for its bioinformatics platform.
Specifically, InSilico said that it will use the funds to further develop InSilico DB, its publicly available online repository of genomic datasets. The company’s investors include Ogone, which specializes in developing technology for making secure online payments, and Foundation Life Science Partners.
InSilico, which spun out of Belgium’s Free University of Brussels last year, offers a commercial service to academia and industry that enables customers to compare their proprietary RNA sequence data with public information and analyze it using open source tools such as the Broad Institute’s Gene Pattern (BI 11/30/2012).
InSilico DB is also linked to GenomeSpace, a software environment developed by the Broad that lets users move their data between multiple genomic analysis tools, such as the Integrative Genomics Viewer, Genomica, and the UCSC Genome Browser, regardless of the data’s format (BI 5/4/2012).
David Weiss, the firm’s co-founder and CEO, told BioInform that his company will use the funds to expand its existing hardware infrastructure in order to allow customers to store and share proprietary data.
The firm is also working to make InSilico DB more secure and obtain appropriate certification, he said.
In addition to targeting clients in the pharmaceutical industry and academia, InSilico Genomics intends to tap into the clinical market by targeting customers in clinical research centers, as well as in clinical trial consortia, Weiss said.
Currently, InSilico DB is being used by more than 1,200 researchers in academia and pharma studying things like cancer, rare diseases, stem cells, and neurological disorders.
The company plans to launch three large pilot projects later this year with undisclosed partners. It expects these projects to last between six months to a year.