GENOMICS & PROTEOMICS
Managing and analysing genomic data for life science discovery
Richard Holland, chief business officer of Eagle Genomics, explains how new bioinformatics and information technology services are being combined to support innovation across a range of life science industry sectors.
ounded and based in Cambridge, UK, Eagle Genomics specialises in bioinformatics, and computational and systems biology, providing expertise on the use of genomic data to discover new products in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and personal care sectors. The company has extensive expertise in the management and analysis of genomic data, including next generation sequencing (NGS). Eagle is also highly experienced in helping customers plan, pilot, and migrate their existing bioinformatics systems ‘into the cloud’.
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“Eagle was created in 2008 when a Big Pharma approached the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) with a request for commercial support for the Ensembl genome browser. Eagle’s three founders, who at that time were all working at the EBI, decided to create a company to provide this service for that original customer and anyone else who needed it,” explains Richard Holland, the company’s chief business officer. “However the business model did not remain exclusively focused on providing support for long, as very soon customers started requesting Eagle to assist with the design and construction of
high-throughput large-data analysis pipelines, for example, for analysing next-generation sequencing data (NGS), a small sideline at first which has grown into a major portion of our business today. “Although started by former EBI staff, Eagle is not connected to or associated with the EBI in any way, it is not a spin-out, and is not a subsidiary,” he states.
Flexible, highly specific solutions Holland says the company’s open-source background has enabled Eagle to design very flexible, very specific solutions that exactly matched the requirements of customers: “This is something that no other commercial competitor in the market appeared to be able to do – and still can’t, it seems, as we have yet to find a credible competitor that can offer the depth of scientific knowledge and flexibility of technical approach that we are able to,” he says. “Not only that but our technology and domain- agnostic approach mean that our solutions are equally applicable in all areas of biotech research, including plant and animal sciences, biofuels, and of course pharma. We
are not aware of any competitor that is active across such a wide range of research domains.”
Genomic data analysis Genomic data management and analysis forms the entirety of the company’s current business. The company was founded by three experienced bioinformaticians who had been working for most of their careers in these areas and it has since only hired equivalently experienced bioinformaticians and software engineers who bring relevant experience from a variety of industry and academic settings. “All of these are specialists in genomic research but from a wide variety of settings including pharma and plant science,” says Holland. “It is our policy to hire only very experienced staff with a stellar track record in genomic bioinformatics. As we expand into other areas in future, for example, proteomics or cheminformatics, we will need to hire suitably qualified staff first.” The services Eagle provides require two main competencies – software development, and biological expertise. As it is rare to find anyone who is an expert in both, the company works as a team on all projects: “The biologists bring an in-depth understanding of the requirements of the customer and the science that they are trying to achieve, whilst the computer scientists are able to implement that in the most efficient and effective way possible,” says Holland. “NGS is just one of the areas which we are able to assist customers with. It turns up in a large number of projects at present but we do not focus on it exclusively, although we do happen to know quite a lot about it! Many customers are still using Sanger sequencing, or doing gene expression analysis with microarrays,” he adds.
As part of its efforts to support and promote the use of open-source tools and data in bioinformatics research, Eagle has produced an Elements of Bioinformatics table, also known as the Periodic Table of Bioinformatics.
26 sp2 Inter-Active July/August 2012
Open-source tools and data analysis pipelines
Eagle’s current offerings fall into two categories: installing/managing/maintaining
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