11.15-16.23-RD-Ontologicy

JOYCE WANG: Earlier this year, when I was finishing my PhD in neuroscience at MIT, I realized that I was wasting a lot of my time on technical issues unrelated to research and much less time than I wanted to on the research itself. So I was not alone in this. When we interviewed life science researchers from labs around the world, they estimated that they waste about 20% of their time on technical issues unrelated to research. Scientists need custom code to make sense of all the data that they produce, but most analyses are written by other scientists, most of whom have no software development experience.

Researchers often waste days to weeks setting up their software just to see if their experiments works in the first place. And when you're a biotech company with a year of runway left, you can't afford to waste those two months. Ontologic solves this problem with a compute platform with two sides, one for each function in a research team.

On the one side, our platform runs analyses directly on the cloud. Scientists don't need to learn a new programming language to see if their experiment is on the right track. All they need is a web browser. On the other side, our platform package is custom code with a graphical interface that is ready to run with the click of a button. Coders can make their analyzes available immediately without having to learn compute cluster orchestration or anything else outside their job description.

With these two sides, our compute platform accelerates discovery by letting teams focus on the science, not the setup of their work. Here's a quick demo of our platform in action. A bench scientist can browse any analysis tool, input their data and parameters, and run it on the cloud, all through their web browser. Our platform is uniquely accessible to researchers at any stage. Anyone can use our platform with no code. But if you do need to code, you can use any programming language you want.

Here's what editing custom code looks like. A computational researcher opens any analysis in an integrated development environment, that pops up in the web browser. The platform automatically stages the relevant software dependencies, packages the code in a reproducible container image, and then updates the tool on the platform for anyone else in the company to use. Together, these two sides provide flexibility at all stages of research.

One of our users, a cell biology researcher out of Emory, was starting a new experiment. But she was facing a massive time sink because she had to troubleshoot both her experimental protocol and her analysis at the same time. With Ontologic, Alishah was able to use a field standard analysis pipeline, all on her browser without having to write any code. And by running her data through our platform after every experiment, she estimated that Ontologic saves her about 10 to 20 hours per month.

So how does Alishah's story affect her working group? In a lot of early-stage biotechs, going from an idea to a result requires iterative collaboration between bench science and data science teams. This can add extra weeks or months because they're passing data back and forth they're throwing it over the fence before they even can see the result of their first experiment. With Ontologic, research teams can iterate faster without losing accuracy or flexibility.

We automate the mechanical usability and orchestration tasks that are usually done by software engineers, thus freeing up their time, their valuable time, that's better spent elsewhere. So the platform, basically, empowers bench science and data science teams to focus on their core competencies, so that they can do better science faster.

Currently, we're looking to onboard R&D teams in biotech. We're looking for early-stage companies or R&D teams with up to 50 employees who can grow alongside us. Our goal is to enable great science by empowering great scientists.

As we all know, the best research that's done in this field is when research teams can build on each other's hard-won knowledge and work. And our mission at Ontologic is to get the time-consuming, technical busywork out of their way and let them focus on solving the hard problems at the core of their business. So if what I've covered today resonates with you or makes you think of an innovative biotech that is laser-focused on making an impact, come find us at our exhibit booth outside, or reach out to me at this information. Thank you so much for your time.