Kevin Davies of Bio-IT World wrote the article “Running tranSMART for the Drug Development Marathon”, an overview of a translational medicine data warehouse project at Johnson & Johnson, led by Eric Perakslis, VP of R&D informatics, managed by Sándor Szalma, senior research fellow, and delivered by Recombinant during an 18-month implementation.

Davies wrote: “TranSMART helps investigators mine drug target, gene and clinical trial data to aid in predictive biomarker discovery, chiefly in immunology and oncology. Perakslis says it is an ‘amazingly advanced’ data warehouse that compares favorably with many such efforts he’s seen in the Pharma world.”

Davies highlighted the open platform approach by Recombinant: “Perakslis is currently having discussions [with Recombinant] about a Red Hat approach where a lot of the advanced analytics is made open source. ‘I’m not running a commercial software company,’ he says. He’s already offered the software to Guna Rajagopal, a colleague at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. In addition, St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, UCSF and other centers are all considering the adoption of the i2b2-based platform.”

Labels: Data Warehousing, i2b2, Open Source, Translational Research

Joel Amoussou wrote the blog post “Unlocking the Potential of Health Information Technology (HIT)”, a sensible perspective on reducing healthcare costs and improving quality through standardization, open source technology, and staff training.

Labels: Open Source

People who know what we do have recently asked me why Recombinant is a for-profit corporation and not a non-profit like our customers. At first I was taken aback by the question but I understood the nature of their request when I took a look at what we do.

We so often integrate our work into non-profit grant funded research. We have a mission to use clinical data to improve the effectiveness of healthcare. This drives us into projects in the non-profit domain relating to furthering research on cancer or other diseases, reducing healthcare disparities, open source medical informatics, improving the quality of healthcare within hospitals, and implementing systems to be used as public infrastructure for clinical research.

So it could make sense for us to have a similar corporate structure to our non-profit customers. But, we are unlike our hospital and academic medical center customers in many ways.

The model of what we do is as a solution provider and not the direct recipient of grants or donations. We don't aspire to be credited as an academic group publishing research. We don't raise money from donors. To achieve our goals in translational research we also serve customers who are for-profit businesses like pharmaceutical companies, software ISVs, government contractors, and CROs.

We also set commitments for service levels for software and system support that ultimately cast us in a commercial for-profit role. We provide services through expert staff that must be delivered through a negotiated rate. We help to migrate initiatives that may be non-profit like open source projects and transform them into sustainable business models when grant funding ultimately runs out.

We operate a market driven business that is needed for non-profits to acquire the expertise, technology, service levels, and sustainability necessary for success. That carries through to our employees being hired at market rates in high demand for roles like Java software engineering and data warehouse modeling. We let them know that they are working at a for-profit enterprise, so customer satisfaction is their goal and not furthering their academic credentials. We can only achieve high productivity by providing the types of incentives a for-profit company offers through the ownership of stock in the company and sharing of profits.

Our model as a bootstrap for-profit business has allowed us to grow from 2 to 32 people in 4 years. So we are very satisfied with the ability to scale. We have resisted investment from either venture capitalists or investment bankers. Although investment is necessary for growth we have not wanted to have to answer to a board driven by an unnecessary time table or expected scale for liquidity. We use traditional working capital from a bank instead.

The bootstrap model requires us to stay profitable at all times, and we invest our profit each quarter in our people and infrastructure so we can continue to grow and achieve our mission. So we operate a tightly controlled, privately held, and growing bootstrap for-profit business.

But, we are very different from larger software and service vendors. We aren't purely involved in healthcare for profit. Our goals are not to sell tools for a maximum profit. Some of our projects have been pro bono. We firmly believe that we can improve patient care by leveraging data. We want to do as much as we can to accomplish this through partnerships with the institutions that can move medicine forwards.

Since many of our customers are non-profits we understand that every dollar spent on our products and services are precious resources that could be spent elsewhere. We are thankful for all of the support we receive. We have learned tremendously from our academic customers and partners.

While we are a for-profit business we only really succeed by delivering a valuable impact to projects that improve healthcare.

Dan Housman
Managing Director, Analytical Applications
Recombinant Data Corp.

Labels: Open Source, Translational Research