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Innovation & Technologie Anfrage

A Dutch biotech company is looking for technologies and expertise for the development and implementation of a bioinformatics platform for next generation sequencing analysis in an online environment.

Country of Origin: Netherlands
Reference Number: TRNL20200707001
Publication Date: 7 July 2020

Summary

The Dutch biotech company is looking for an IT-based technology and expertise to productize their pipelines to analyse and interpret viral next generation sequence data. The outcome should be implemented with the highest security in a broader market. The company is looking for a collaboration with companies and academia and envisions a commercial agreement with technical assistance, a license agreement or a technical cooperation agreement. This request is part of an open innovation challenge.

Description

A Dutch biotechnology company and state-of-the-art laboratory is specialized in (molecular) diagnostic testing and diagnostic assay development. The company performs advanced (molecular) diagnostic testing on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and clinical laboratories, within the complex framework of preclinical studies and Phase II-IV clinical trials. The company also designs, develops, and validates novel diagnostic assays, which can be tailor-made for specific diagnostic purposes.

Today, bioinformatics is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field, employed for the purpose of managing and analysing data gathered from life science, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries. The robust technological advancements in life sciences technologies, such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), have subsequently assisted the increasing demand for bioinformatics services at a similar pace. According to the “Bioinformatics: Technologies and Global Markets” report from Business Communications Company (BCC), the bioinformatics market is expected to grow from $7.5 billion in 2018 to $20.0 billion by 2023 (BCC Publishing, 2019).



The on-going Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of a standardized and scalable way to analyse and share data. Researchers and clinicians need to be assured that their analytical results will provide accurate outcome. The company’s bioinformatics department has developed sophisticated pipelines to analyse and interpret viral NGS data, enabling the high-throughput generation of high-quality results. (A so called pipeline in bioinformatics can be regarded as a highly specific workflow to interpret the sequence data). Their pipelines have successfully aided in the development of Hepatitis C antiviral treatment. 

Today, the company is confident that this could benefit companies and people around the globe and accelerate work in the life and health sciences field. It is for this reason that the company would like to make their specific pipelines and expertise accessible in a broader life sciences community and other fields of application. 



Until now, the pipelines and platform were primarily used for the company’s own lab services and dedicated assays. Since they are a relatively small company working on the niche topic of virology, the company lacks the resources, network, and experience on how to position their bioinformatics services to other entities. For instance, software as a service (SaaS) products are outside their field of expertise. Furthermore, the company is not familiar with such business cases.



Therefore, the company is looking for technologies and expertise in order to productize their solutions: i.e. the above mentioned pipelines.  

Hence, the basic question can be stated as: “How can the company leverage their proprietary bioinformatics pipelines, and make them available to other companies or academic institutions in the life sciences sector?

The company is looking for companies, academia and entrepreneurs with experience in:

•	Interface design and user experience

•	Platform business models

•	Product management

•	Productizing of software or cloud-based solutions

•	Cloud security and compliance

•	Data privacy



Furthermore, the company is highly interested in how the productized solutions can be brought to the attention of researchers and companies around the world in a convincing way.



The company envisions a commercial agreement with technical assistance, a license agreement or a technical cooperation agreement. When serving the purpose also other agreements can be envisioned.





IMPORTANT NOTE: This technology request is part of an innovation challenge and is published on an open innovation platform.

Expertise sought

The requested expertise and technology is a mix of software, innovative idea’s regarding the safe implementation of the foreseen IT-product and using internet as communication pathway.

The company is looking for companies and entrepreneurs with experience in:

•	Interface design and user experience

•	Platform business models

•	Product management

•	Productizing of software or cloud-based solutions

•	Cloud security and compliance

•	Data privacy



Furthermore, the company is highly interested in how the productized solutions can be brought to the attention of researchers and companies around the world in a compelling way.



The continuous advancements in information and cloud technologies have enabled the company to facilitate the pipeline in a highly robust and scalable environment. However, cloud solutions come with a number of risks. Especially, in case the company expands to a bigger market, that includes hospitals and patients, security and privacy becomes really important. Considering the nature of the data the company wishes the platform to be a solid and secure foundation to facilitate this expansion.

Stage Of Development

Available for demonstration

Stage Of Development Comment

The company would expect the stage of the technology to be at or beyond proof of feasibility and preferably already be proven in commercial applications, not necessary life sciences related.

Requested partner

The company is looking for SMEs or academic institutions and other innovators who can help to develop a safe bioinformatics platform for next generation sequencing analysis in an online environment. Partners are invited to contribute to a creative open innovation process, strategy thinking and further technical development. 



The envisioned role of the partner can be explained according to the following disciplines:

•	Product management

•	SaaS products marketing

•	UI/UX design

•	Cyber security

•	Data privacy

•	Platform business models

•	Creative thinking



IMPORTANT NOTE: This technology request is part of an innovation challenge and is published on an open innovation platform from the 6th of July and will close on the 6th of August. If an organization does express interest in cooperation with this firm before closing date, it will be guided towards this open innovation platform on which one can get in touch with the company experts. Mind that posts on this platform are not confidential.

After that, the company will select the SME's with whom they would like to cooperate in the development of a solution. Once the challenge is closed, EOI's for this technology request will be treated in the traditional way.