“I just don’t know how to start off. They sent me this random link to download the data, but I can’t even open it afterwards. What do I do?”
This was one of the most common phrases I heard when starting off my MSc. A phrase said not only by graduate students, but by post docs and principle investigators alike. I was very lucky in my position to be mentored by remarkable scientists who taught me the ins and outs of running various analyses, as well as how to approach learning new ones. But before I knew it, 95% of my time was spent on collaborative projects and helping other people look into their data. I taught through the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops and on my own to try and help other people overcome this hinderance with analysis, but quickly I realized I would only be able to tackle so many projects.
Upon finishing up my Master’s degree, I worked for a year as a bioinformatician, assisting project analyses professionally as well as managing the massive amount of data my employer had (data management being a whole other problem on its own). But even when I was in this unique role of data management and analysis, the problems I’d seen throughout my MSc were still present.
I’d been formally trained in engineering as a discipline. My previous mentor was truly one of a kind, and taught me just how to approach solving systemic problems that slow down a whole system.
With his words echoing through me, I began to look at the fundamentals of why bioinformatics is often so shrouded in mystery and so difficult to obtain for smaller labs.
The Problem
Most labs have a point person that is capable of writing bioinformatics pipelines that are suited to the labs needs. If the lab doesn’t have a member like this internally, they often collaborate with someone who does. The issue is that often these collaborations consist of a new graduate student who is assigned to learn the entire analytical process, debug it along the way, and then manage this analysis with the rest of their work (an experience I knew first hand). What this entailed though, were projects that took a much much longer period of time to answer the initial biological question, while detracting more computational-leaning students from being able to do the investigations they’d wanted to do.
I’d also seen how simply teaching the biologists how to run the analysis themselves could help them ‘catch their own fish’, but it just wasn’t scalable.
It was almost serendipity that my current fellow founders and I were talking about this exact problem, and how we would fix it. Each of us had spent years dealing with different aspects of the problems found primarily in academia, so we were more than familiar about the pain points. While talking aloud about “wouldn’t it be cool if instead of ____, we did _____”, and as the conversation flowed, BioBox became more concrete. We began to think,
“you know what? Why don’t we go about solving these problems we’ve faced. We know the landscape, we know the struggles, and we know how we’d want to change it.”
From there I looked at all the other companies currently advertising their ‘solutions’, and realized why they weren’t succeeding: they weren’t fixing the problem of bioinformatics for the people who needed it, which were the biologists! That was the root of the issue that I wanted BioBox to help frame and fix.
My vision for BioBox is to be a platform that helps take that expert’s pipelines (the one that’s spent months of trials and errors to fix and develop) and make it available to anyone in the lab who needs it! From the biologist who wants to analyze his own data, to the graduate student who’s looking to learn. I want it not to be a solution built just for bioinformaticians, but be simple enough for anyone to use and understand!
I want BioBox to help experts come together and help the field of genomic grow as a whole, so that everyone feels connected and never has to worry about answering the question “I have my data, but now what do I do?”
It was a little scary to start BioBox in the beginning. I’d built up very close relationships with my old lab and in the field as a whole, and spent so long helping them complete their projects that I was a bit worried about not being able to do that for them anymore. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how much BioBox would help them and countless others like them in the ways they’d needed. When I told my colleagues about the idea to create BioBox, their support became one of the strongest moments of confirmation for what we were building.
Since founding BioBox my day-to-day life has definitely been a lot more busy. The world of academia is filled with long nights and weekends, so working over a “standard” work week was not strange to me. But as an entrepreneur, the efficiency that’s required to keep up with the deadlines was a whole new level. There’s just so much that you have to learn and relearn, from balancing engineering and administrative duties, legal paperwork, and finding time to balance out all the personal connections in between. Thankfully, I’m lucky to have outstanding colleagues and friends who’ve been there every step of the way, each of us motivating the other to continually do better.
Building for the future
To me BioBox isn’t just another tool that’ll be used by scientists to run a couple of analyses and answer some questions. To me BioBox is and will be the solution to every problem that I, and my colleagues, had faced every day. I want future scientists and aspiring scientists to be able to use a platform that lets them focus on the questions that they’re spending years of their trying to answer; to assist them in their pursuit to help the communities they’re hoping to help; and to make the entire experience of research better. The daunting question of “omg I have this random data from my experiment, what do I do now?” should be a relic of the past and never cause anxiety again. Eventually, I want BioBox to be the place where experts of all fields are able to come work together, share their knowledge, and help answer the most complicated hypotheses we face today.
This story is a part of a month-long series to highlight the people and mission of BioBox Analytics. Follow along to see what we’re up to as an early-stage Biotech startup:
Start Here
A Founder’s Story: Chris Li, CEO of BioBox Analytics (1/3)
A Founder’s Story: Julian Mazzitelli, CIO of BioBox Analytics (3/3)
