The next big medical breakthrough may start in a small business with a big idea. Recognizing the potential and promise of early-stage companies for addressing unmet medical needs, the BIO International Convention will once again host the Innovation Zone on the exhibit floor of the San Diego Convention Center, June 19-22. Eighty emerging companies will showcase biotechnology breakthroughs in drug discovery, diagnostics, and other therapeutic platform technologies.
The Innovation Zone was created through a partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the intent to group Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)-funded companies together on the exhibit floor of the BIO International Convention. The SBIR program provides U.S. federal funding to small businesses engaged in research and development with demonstrated potential for commercialization. Companies are rigorously vetted through the NIH and NSF SBIR review process prior to receiving the funding.
David Wild, Ph.D. is President and Founder of Data2Discovery Inc.
Today we spoke with Innovation Zone exhibitor David Wild, Ph.D., Founder and President of Data2Discovery Inc., a SBIR-funded company through NSF.
What is your company’s lead product or technology?
At Data2Discovery, we’ve created a highly innovative linked data and graph data mining infrastructure for accelerating drug discovery research in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
How has the NSF SBIR program helped your company grow?
In Phase I, we were able to demonstrate feasibility for key scientific problems including finding new applications for existing drugs and accelerating understanding of phenotypic data. The NSF SBIR program is giving us the building blocks needed to take our scientific idea born in a university setting and commercialize it, and the iCorps program helped us to understand customer discovery and product/market fit.
What are the upcoming milestones and long-term priorities for your company?
Our near term focus is on delivering on our product commitments to current customers in order to build trust and reach our business development goals, thus enabling customer satisfaction and further developing a scalable, repeatable product for the life sciences and healthcare industry. We are doing this with the support of the NSF and by engaging with our customers as well as business, technology, and scientific advisors.
Our long term priorities include growing our customer base and annual revenue at least 10 times within 7 years. Our plan includes being on the forefront of life science and disruptive technology market trends to deliver innovative machine learning, AI, and advanced algorithms, while building an experienced team of data scientists, computational informaticians and subject matter experts in life sciences and healthcare.
What do you hope to gain out of your participation at the 2017 BIO International Convention?
We are looking forward to the opportunity of meeting potential industry partners, learning from other successes, and sharing with others the value of our data science technology.
Tell us something about your company that investors might not know…
We have a license to commercialize research in data science coming out of two of Indiana University’s leading research groups and have a patent pending in a highly promising new way of doing machine learning using linked data subgraphs as descriptors.
