A startup computational biology outsourcing and consulting company, Creative Bioinformatics Consultants, LLC, established operations in Gainesville last fall and is quickly growing to fill a void in this increasingly growing international market.
Creative Bioinformatics was founded by PhD scientist Mark Ziats during the conclusion of his doctoral research in computational genomics at the University of Cambridge in England. Creative Bioinformatics Consultants recently completed its 50th client project since commencing operations last fall, and has seen a doubling in revenue each quarter since opening for business. Creative Bioinformatics specializes in user-directed data analysis and software creation spanning the gamut of biological ‘big data,’ including genomics, proteomics, systems biology and machine learning studies.
Ziats moved to Gainesville bringing Creative Bioinformatics with him in 2013. Creative Bioinformatics Consultants operates as a ‘virtual’ company out of their Gainesville office, with other management and freelancers collaborating on client projects across the globe. This very lean model has allowed the startup to become profitable immediately and grow very quickly, since overhead costs are so low. Furthermore, being in Gainesville brings great opportunities to work with the many local biotechnology companies and with UF academic research labs as clients, and also to recruit UF graduates as we grow.
Unlike many large genomics or informatics companies that provide pipeline software that users implement themselves, Creative Bioinformatics takes the unique hands-on approach of providing customer-specific data analysis and reporting that Ziats recognized was lacking in this competitive space. “During my graduate studies, I was constantly getting asked by collaborators and other labs in our department to help them with very specific computational analyses that off-the-shelf software could not handle, and after doing this as a courtesy for a while I realized there was a big demand for this type of service,” Ziats said.
Creative Bioinformatics plans to continue to grow and expand in the coming year, particularly as they have begun to take on more industry and startup biotechnology companies as clients.
Their clients include academic laboratories, non-profit research organizations, and biotechnology companies looking to leverage the power of computational approaches to data analysis provided by their global network of expert bioinformaticians. Creative Bioinformatics works one-on-one with researchers to address specific project’s needs.
For more information, please visit https://www.creativebioinformatics.com.