A new startup, Bioz launches first life science search engine | Gains $3m fund from Esther Dyson
The evolution of technology, from natural language processing to machine learning, is now helping the software world find more places to interact with biology.
Bioz, a new search engine for life science experiments, wants to reduce the time researchers take to thumb through thousands of science articles published online and get them right to the findings relevant to their search.
It’s not the first to offer up scientific papers through search – Google Scholar already surfaces articles for researchers from peer-reviewed resources, as does the popular PLOS ONE. But Bioz believes it has a business model that will set it apart from the others.
Bioz doesn’t charge the researcher for its findings. Instead, it makes money from a flat fee per click to the vendor. It’s not entirely clear how this would work. The explanation is quite murky here and there is a lot of free competition in the space that does not attach itself to an advertising model for vendors but from what we got from a spokesperson, vendors are charged when people click on a vendor site while searching for articles
.Eventually, Bioz will work very similarly to Google Adwords says co-founder, Daniel Levitt. Vendors and manufacturers of life science products will bid per click instead of the flat fee.
Levitt said it won’t take researchers much time at all to get used to the search engine, which he said is similar in function toGoogle (GOOG), but domain specific to the life sciences. Bioz also provides a much deeper search.
A new paper is published every 10 seconds and can run more than 30 pages, creating a limitless haystack of unstructured information. He said their platform goes through the scientific articles and analyzes the text, similar to what researchers would do manually. Then it structures the information extracted into meaningful insight for the researchers.
“This won’t cure cancer, but it will help those looking for a cure for cancer, find that cure,” he said.
Each year, researchers in academia and biopharma spend $80 billion to purchase millions of products (reagents, consumables and instruments) for use in life science experiments, but there is no source for feedback on those purchases, Lachmi told. Lachmi who is a co-founder of Bioz, brought her idea to Levitt, who recruited two software engineers with experience in natural language processing. Together, the four built Bioz (www.bioz.com).
“It’s easier today to book a hotel or buy shoes online than it is to find information I need for my research,” she said.
More than 30,000 users have beta-tested the search engine and have overwhelmingly given it a thumbs up, Levitt said. Lachmi said the current beta-users love the product because there’s nothing like it on the market and it can help the researchers “make unbiased decisions” when it comes to deciding which products to use in experiments.
The Bioz search engine also has its own “Yelp-like” rating system called Bioz Stars. The new stars system is designed to help scientists using the search engine to identify the right products for their experiments, Levitt said. Drawing on another online model such as Amazon, Bioz Stars is expected to benefit researchers who are searching for products to use in their experiments and connect them with vendors of life science tools who can view their product ratings, he added. This search engine also allows scientists to search through each article and cross check information with other articles.
Bioz announced it has already gained $3 million in seed funding from industry investors, including Esther Dyson.
“The business model for Bioz is around things you can buy, but there’s a subtext that you should be paying attention to everything,” Dyson said of why she invested. “And Bioz can help you find all those external factors you may not be noticing.”
