Our Company:

VizX Labs is a bioinformatics company developing systems for data acquisition, management, and analysis of molecular biology data and information. These products and services allow biologists to readily incorporate sophisticated data management and computational analysis into their research efforts. The results include improved quality and productivity in the experimental and decision-making processes.

The Market Need:

What are Microarrays?

Microarrays help scientists understand how genes work. They measure how the actions of genes result in disease (and other biological states). A microarray contains collections of genes in rows and columns on a chip about the size of a stamp. Each of these collections is tiny-barely the size of the period at the end of this sentence-and a single microarray can contain 100,000 or more genes.

Talking about a revolution

Microarrays are the basis of a revolution in the field of genetics. Only a few years ago, experiments that generated only a few data points could take years to complete. Today, a similar experiment can generate hundreds of thousands of data points in a few days.

Genes are found in the long threads of DNA inside the nucleus of every living cell. DNA is a two-stranded molecule that coils around itself to form chromosomes. The answers to some of the greatest puzzles of biology lie within DNA. One particularly intriguing question is how genes go awry and cause diseases. Up until the advent of microarrays in the mid-1990s, researching genes that cause disease was done very slowly-by studying a single gene or a handful of genes at a time. Tremendous amounts of work were required to obtain the quantity of diseased tissues necessary. Then came the microarray, combining advances in robotics, chemistry, and semiconductor fabrication, which allowed a researcher to simultaneously sample every single gene involved in a disease.

How do they work?

Small segments of genes are chemically created and fastened to a chip-often a glass slide or nylon membrane wafer. The gene fragments automatically link to complementary strands because of their biological nature. Microarrays take advantage of this by putting several hundred molecules of single-stranded gene fragments in each spot on the chip. Each single strand will find its partner from a group of active genes, which have been extracted from diseased cells. The single-stranded gene fragments are labeled with either a green or red fluorescent tag to tell the researcher which ones have found their partners. The red, green, and yellow spots are imaged, and the color and brightness of each spot is measured and given a value. Brighter spots indicate higher gene activity.

Data Sifting

The researcher must sift through all the numerical values to determine if a gene has become activated or not. A huge amount of data is obtained from each experiment. Using this data helps both ensure that the experiment is valid and makes sure that each gene has been measured correctly and accurately. Additionally, biologists are now able to not only analyze the active genes and compare them to sets of thousands of healthy genes, but also to determine if there are patterns of genes that suggest an organized genetic response-a response that could serve as the basis for a better way to diagnose or treat a disease.

Software Solutions:

"Enterprise-wide" software solutions are used in some of the largest biopharmaceutical companies at a cost of $500,000 or more per year. However, for the vast majority of research labs -- worldwide more than 5,000 public and private -- the software is underdeveloped and poorly integrated, characteristics of a cottage industry.

Researchers have worked with microarrays for years, but many cannot afford an enterprise solution and/or use tools as varied as Excel and programs developed in-house for a specific project.

VizX Labs believes this reality represents a large, unserved market opportunity.

New era

The initial elucidation of the approximately 30,000 genes that comprise the human genome produced an avalanche of biological data that must be continuously mined to advance medicine, diagnosis, and drug development.

The Human Genome Project generated enormous quantities of data. Understanding the biology of proteins, mRNA, transcription, and translation is a much larger problem.

New research

Using DNA microarray technology to gain powerful insight, scientists sift through data to identify genes, proteins, and their function that cause disorders and diseases.

New tools to make sense of it all: VizX Labs

The success of microarray experiments is limited by bioinformatic tools that are expensive, functionally limited, may not be scalable, and may lack comprehensive technical support.

Much of the sequence data exists in the public domain and in disparate and redundant databases. A wide variety of methods required to extract desired data make it difficult to assemble information. Nonetheless, scientists need this information to make an educated selection of gene probes used as 'spots' on a DNA microarray and to correlate their results with existing knowledge.

Researchers have a tremendous need for software that can analyze, integrate, and organize enormous quantities of data. VizX Labs is developing the tools that assist researchers to make important discoveries.

Our Strategy:

VizX Labs is targeting biological researchers as primary customers and users of its products on an international basis at pricing that can be approved at the laboratory level.

VizX Labs is designing software that is current, convenient, and complementary. Our first product, the microarray data analysis system GeneSifter™, has been built de novo on a modern Web-based "thin-client" architecture. It works anytime, anyplace, on any platform, fitting the way microarray researchers work.

VizX Labs is assembling an intellectual property portfolio through internal research and development, and is pursuing collaborations using licensing and consortium development.

More information:

For additional information please contact us at 206.283.4363 or email: info@vizxlabs.com