Founded in 1997, Genedata AG provides modular software suites for drug discovery and other sectors of life science research. Genedata’s three major software platforms are the Phylosopher for target discovery, the Expressionist for biomarker discovery and the Screener for lead discovery. Sales of the three platforms are evenly split. According to Othmar Pfannes, Genedata’s CEO, the Swiss company’s longevity has been sustained by a close-knit core of software developers and the direct relationship it has with its customers. As he explained, this relationship has given Genedata a deeper understanding of how researchers actually run their experiments: “Genedata ensures that viewers, algorithms and data structures are specific for given tasks and the software includes significant business logic. To deliver this requires domain knowledge and experience that we have gained through over 10 years of close collaborations with many major customers.” This has also allowed the company to introduce standalone platforms. “[Genedata’s] Screener system for high-throughput and high-content data is a turnkey system for supporting pretty much any screening process. The viewers and algorithms are built-in and the data processing follows a business logic that we have found in the industry. No additional customization is required to use the software, as is usually the case with other software products,” said Mr. Pfannes. In addition to drug discovery, the company also has customers in industrial biotechnology, biofuels, agricultural research and molecular diagnostics.

The company cites the business alliances it maintains with instrument manufacturers such as PerkinElmer, Illumina and Thermo Fisher Scientific as a catalyst for the development of its software, but it was not always the case. “Initially, we were seen by instrument companies as competitors, as they thought our software would substitute the software that comes with instruments,” said Mr. Pfannes. According to him, this changed as companies found that the software’s ability to analyze large amounts of data was making the data more valuable, and thus was helping companies sell more instruments. “We have established some very close technical relationships over the last few years with technology providers who make sure that we support their instruments and data formats,” said Mr. Pfannes.

According to Mr. Pfannes, a key component of all three of the company’s software platforms is that they have been designed to analyze half-terabyte to multiple terabytes of data in about the same amount of time it takes to capture the data—a feat many life science informatics companies are currently attempting to tackle. The company’s newest product, the Genedata Analyst, introduced in March, focuses on the statistical analysis and visualization of large data sets. Mr. Pfannes explained that the company will utilize its experience in life science informatics to continue to make its software able to handle ever-expanding data sets: “[For the] Expressionist, this began with an early ability to handle a very large number of microarrays in a single run. The data volume of mass spectrometry and next-generation sequencing have far surpassed the data volumes previously seen with microarrays, but some of the techniques that we used with older hardware are still in use in current systems.”