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Sole Gatto, Ph.D., Bioinformatics Scientist II & Julio Fernandez, Ph.D., Principal Bioinformatics Scientist & Adam Pavlicek, Founder & CEO and Bill Young Greenwald, Ph.D., Bioinformatics Scientist IThe moniker of The Unicorn—the mythical, single-horned creature—is typically bestowed upon an individual or entity that excels at multiple crafts. Stands to reason that Monoceros Biosystems—the bioinformatics solutions provider that brings top-flight analyses to small companies at affordable costs— named itself Monoceros, which is Greek for unicorn. Headquartered in San Diego, the company arrived at the title after acknowledging that its supreme attribute is, in fact, its multifaceted team.
"By leveling the playing field, we have ensured that both a commercial biotech company and startup have access to topnotch bioinformatics support for their specific needs"
In the arena of bioinformatics and computational biology, while some organizations excel at the software used for programming, others specialize in biostatistics, machine learning, and the analytics quotient of the interdisciplinary field. Bioinformatics is comprised of four pillars in the drug industry: programming, statistics, biology, and drug discovery. The third and fourth pillars—biology and drug discovery—are typically outside the realm of expertise for professionals that focus on the first two pieces of the puzzle. “A person who has deep expertise in even three areas is a superstar. However, it’s nearly impossible to find a professional that is well-versed with all four disciplines,” says Adam Pavlicek, founder and CEO of Monoceros Biosystems, a company that combines the expertise of a versatile workforce to deliver professional, Pharma-grade bioinformatics solutions. “Since we bring an integrated offering to the table, we are unicorns,” he smiles.
Since Team Monoceros’ bioinformatics scientists, biologists, and domain experts possess a background in drug discovery, the company covers every juncture of the drug discovery and development process. “Some clients have stopped categorizing our services as bioinformatics. Instead, they call us ‘drug hunters’ and we live up to that reputation by developing holistic, customized solutions rather than just tools to solve one or two problems,” notes Pavlicek. Many companies simply analyze data that were already generated. Monoceros believes that the most critical stage is before any experimental data is even generated. Convinced that “good results require excellent experimental design,” Monoceros works as a client’s “extended team member” to design ideal experiments with the right control groups, appropriate statistical power, and to control for confounding factors and batch effects. The collaborative process helps Monoceros analyze and interpret data with utmost precision while using their deep subject matter expertise in drug discovery to better interpret results. During early stages, Monoceros calls upon its broad network of providers if it lacks in-house expertise. “For example, if a client requires a genomic technology vendor, we recommend the best options. We are not averse to working with other vendors to develop optimal solutions,” adds Pavlicek.
Monoceros’ services cover all the stages of drug discovery and development. The target identification services include genomics data analysis, knowledge mining, and analysis of functional phenotypic screens.
Rather than focusing on specific technology areas, we follow our principles: scientific excellence, customer focus, innovation, and evolution
Target Clientele: Smaller Biotech Companies
When Monoceros was founded in early 2017, there was a growing demand for bioinformatics support in life sciences. With the interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics evolving to broader concepts, almost as extensive as biology itself, a number of pharmaceutical and biotech organizations assembled in-house bioinformatics departments. However, the smaller biotech firms did not have the necessary resources to do so. This is where Monoceros saw a huge opportunity. “Our mission was to harness the level of support and specialization of large bioinformatics teams, and combine that with the speed and urgency of smaller organizations,” recalls Pavlicek. Since a majority of the world’s biotech companies are startups, they cannot access professional grade bioinformatics. By bridging this gap between high-quality bioinformatics and the need of startup companies, Monoceros has had great success. “By leveling the playing field, we have ensured that both a commercial biotech company and startup have access to top-notch bioinformatics support for their specific needs,” Pavlicek adds.
Over the last three years, Monoceros has made a concerted effort to forge extended partnerships with its clients. By gaining deep knowledge of a particular project (whether it be early target identification or late stage drug discovery), Monoceros enhances its own ability to analyze and interpret data. To that end, Monoceros assigns a dedicated scientist for each project and thereby begins the process of building its knowledge pool. The same procedure applies to even small projects. Pavlicek says, “The size of the project has never mattered to us. We follow the same protocols, gather feedback from analyses, and try to answer all the questions a client may have about the extracted data, as well as derive conclusions and recommendations for next experiments.”
Most of all, Monoceros takes pride in designing solutions that are not restricted to boiler-plate analysis of biological data, as is the norm among other bioinformatics solution providers. “Data analysis for drug development is not a one-off process. As we try to answer one question from our clients, there will invariably be a new set of questions that are presented to us. We don’t stop answering questions until we truly unlock the full value of that specific experiment or data,” explains Pavlicek. Also, while most bioinformatics scientists can analyze data, far too many are not particularly comfortable interpreting the meaning of the results, adapting them to the practical realities of experimental work, and explaining them to traditional biological scientists.
Since Monoceros has deep-rooted expertise in the application of bioinformatics, biostatistics, and machine learning, it provides “iteration services” to ensure its clients can seamlessly understand the finer points of the results and their limitations. “We don’t just send reports of result, we focus on the critical discussions and interpretation of the data and ultimately on enabling our clients to make informed decisions” stresses Pavlicek.
Monoceros’ meticulous and individually customized approach to data analysis was highlighted in a recent success involving a client that had acquired a new clinical asset. After performing their initial clinical hypothesis, the client was unsure of the extent and scope to which the asset could be harnessed (as it pertains to clinical indicators, targets, and biomarkers). Monoceros helped them analyze their own datasets in tandem with publicly-available data from genome-wide association studies and gene expression studies to determine the suitable disease indication. Going one step further, Monoceros identified the potential role of the target with another set of closely-related diseases that have high and unmet needs. The client later verified, through preclinical testing in animal models, that their drug reduced the disease symptoms in the treated animals. Today, the client is in the second stage of the clinical trial, where they are testing the drug on patients with otherwise limited treatment options.
Balancing Innovation and Industry Needs
Monoceros checks all the boxes of a company that banks on innovation. For starters, the company offers an “open toolbox of solutions” to solve specific client requirements. According to Pavlicek, if the platform-agnostic toolbox does not include a solution that passed Monoceros high stringency requirements, Monoceros enters an additional experimental stage to find a custom solution. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we put noisy data through a black box algorithm to produce results,” he says.
Secondly, Monoceros maintains an internal “wish list” where new ideas and methods are ingested at regular intervals. Monoceros draws a fine line between ideas that are financially feasible and ones that are overly ambitious. Pavlicek notes, “The ideas (we insert) could vary from small improvements of the existing methods to completely novel approaches. Once every year, we review the wish list and handpick at least 1 or 2 ideas that warrant funding.” To cap it off, Monoceros takes a novel approach toward creating an “institutional memory” that help the bioinformatics experts to solve problems more rapidly in the future. “We are very strict about maintaining client confidentiality. What we learn from each project, we anonymize and use to build scalable solution pipelines, allowing us to deliver faster and better solutions the next time we face analogous questions. As a result, our toolbox keeps growing and clients get better, faster service for the same price.”
Driving forward, Monoceros will continue to provide top-notch computation biology and bioinformatics services, while keeping close tabs on emerging technologies. “No one has a crystal ball to predict what technologies will be the future winners. Rather than focusing on specific technology areas, we follow our principles: scientific excellence, customer focus, innovation, and evolution,” says Pavlicek. With a razor sharp-focus on making significant strides year over year, Monoceros intends to constantly evolve and keep pace with innovations in both drug discovery and technology. “As the quality and size of biomedical datasets matures, advances of cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are going transform the biotechnology industry, and we want to be part of that change,” Pavlicek concludes.
September 23, 2019
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