Democratising Biodata Analytics with BigOmics

BigOmics Analytics was founded in 2018 – almost a year after winning third prize at the StartCup Ticino challenge – as a spin-off of the Institute of Oncology Research (affiliated to the USI Faculty of Biomedical Sciences), and is currently incubated at the CP Start-up of USI. The Ticino-based startup has just entered a partnership agreement with Finland’s BC Platforms, allowing the self-service analytics platforms of BigOmics to complement the tertiary analytics offerings of BC Platforms for enterprises.

BC Platforms is a global leader in providing a sturdy data storage and management platform as well as data science solutions for personalised healthcare. The company has a strong scientific heritage underpinned by over 20 years of working in close collaboration with a network of leading researchers, developers, manufacturers and vendors. With this partnership, BigOmics aims at reaching international corporate customers and expand globally.

Combatting the coronavirus crisis with Big Data
In 2019, BigOmics launched Omics Playground, a cloud-based self-service platform for analysing and visualising biological data at the molecular level, known as omics data (“omics” is a neologism, which generally refers to fields of study in biology, e.g. genomics, proteomics, etc.). In early 2020, BigOmics launched an open-access VirOmics Playground, a special edition of Omics Playground dedicated to Covid-19. The platform gained a significant amount of traction in the market during the pandemic, providing crucial and timely public data and its analysis to scientists involved in Covid-19 research.

VirOmics Playground allows researchers easy access to a sophisticated analysis of biomedical data, for example, various samples of previous infections with coronavirus such as MERS and SARS as well as the current SARS-CoV-2. Through this platform, researchers and specialists can quickly and intuitively visualise various information that can help in the study and fight against infectious diseases and tumours, to identify, for instance, potential drugs with antiviral activities, genes for the development of vaccines or genetic indicators that indicate the presence of an infection in the absence of symptoms, depending on the available data. The platform has been visited by more than 5'000 users in the second quarter.

Democratising biodata analytics
“Many real-world problems are complex in nature and need cross-disciplinary approaches to tackle them”, says Ivo Kwee, CTO and co-founder of BigOmics with a background in medical physics and further specialisation in data science. “In our case, biologists collect huge amounts of omics data that need to be analysed quickly and efficiently. With VirOmics Playground we provide biologists – who usually have little training in computer science – with a ready-to-use tool to easily analyse and visualise the data themselves, without having to learn how to write code or program software systems”.

For co-founder and CEO (and AI expert) Murodzhon Akhmedov, “Big Data has become a commodity, but volumes are growing so fast that soon there will not be enough bioinformaticians to understand and analyse them – and, hence, make good use of them. Our mission at BigOmics is, in a nutshell, to ‘democratise’ Big Data analysis in life science research, which is something we believe will have a disruptive effect in the field”.

International recognition and regional prospects
Among other recent and noteworthy achievements, in June BigOmics was selected for both the EU-financed InvestHorizon Accelerator and Alchemist - a Silicon Valley-based accelerator. Both accelerators offer a 6-month program to support business development, product-market-fit, traction and future fundraising. In May 2020, the European Commission scored BigOmics platforms as a high-quality project, awarding it the "Seal of Excellence", a quality label conferred by the EU for first-class innovative ideas worthy of entrepreneurial investment. Also, in December 2019 BigOmics was accepted for Microsoft's startup support program, which provides Azure cloud credits for computational purposes and supports in business development.

BigOmics is well placed in the young and growing life sciences ecosystem in the southern Alpine region. In addition to the pharma industries which have settled in Ticino over the past decades (e.g. IBSA, Helsinn, Zambon), the Italian-speaking canton has made great strides as a hub for biomedical research, with two leading institutes located in Bellinzona (the mentioned IOR and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, IRB, both affiliated to USI), but also as a growing competence centre in AI and digital technologies, leading to important prospects in the field of digital health, for instance.

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