Draft of executive plan

Scale Genomics

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized biology and is in the process of revolutionizing medicine. The prices are dropping much faster than even predicted by Moore’s law. It is possible now to sequence the human genome for $5,000 and the prices are dropping. For $5,000 you get a file that contains hundreds of millions of short sequences amounting to ~90,000,000,000 letters A, T, G, C that correspond to a DNA sequence from some place in the human genome. One of these letters might be different from what one normally has and that one difference can be responsible for cancer. Or be completely harmless.

The future is sequence-based and completely digital – DNA from every blood test, every biopsy, every nose swab will be sequenced. It is clear that the problem is no going to be how to get the data – that part is quickly becoming a commodity with razor-thin margins – but what to do with these data, how to extract actionable knowledge from this overwhelming flood.

Scale Genomics provides the Cloud NGS Platform for carrying out the information extraction from the NGS data. We have built a software layer (called Open Scale) that allows researchers or companies to store and share their data, and to build and share analyses pipelines with the maximum levels of flexibility, transparency and control. Everything is done on top of Linux and open source virtual machine tools. The plan is to make Open Scale available for installation on client machines with a seamless integration into the Scale Genomics Cloud.

We provide data storage at a fraction of the cost of Amazon and specialize in the creation of high-end virtual machines that are applicable for high-powered computation needed in the NGS field. Our service is agnostic about which cloud we run our software layer on and in expect to run it on multiple clouds. For now, the cloud computing prices are too high and we run a private cloud.

Ultimately we also aim to provide:

• an App Store for NGS analysis software,
• a services marketplace that connects bioinformaticians with biologists and medical professionals,
• a high-end bioinformatics consulting service,
• and a back-end white label platform that can be used by biotech and medical services companies to hang their shingle on and to seamlessly provide their services.

The team of Scale Genomics combines the complimentary expertise of the two primary co-founders, Prof. Dmitri Petrov and Dmitri Don.

Dmitri Petrov is a Professor of Biology at Stanford focused on the applications of NGS approaches in genetics.

Dmitri Don is the founder of one of the oldest independent photo sharing service Fotki.com focused on storing and handling vast, multi-petabyte, amounts of data.

We also benefit from the expertise of two key advisors:

Igor Shoifot (who is also a co-founder of Scale Genomics and a co-founder of Fotki.com), who is focused on the business development,

and

Dr. Joel Dudley, who is focused on the relationships between Scale Genomics and the biotech community.