with Torrey Pines, and ‘Path’ has multiple meanings in business as well as in biotechnology.” (For out-of-towners: The Torrey Pine, the rarest pine in North America, can be found on a coastal overlook north of the La Jolla village at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve.)
Before he started Torrey Path, Dresslar says he was working as an informatics consultant brought in by big pharma companies to help organize data on multi-million dollar research projects. It worked OK, but Dresslar says, “what scientists really needed was information coming from across a whole platform.”
For example, a customer identifying potential drug targets said it wanted to be able to search the computerized results of microarray test data from its own laboratories. But what the company’s scientists really wanted, Dresslar says, was the ability to search through data in the public domain as well as the in-house data. They weren’t allowed to do that, because data searches through public domains usually generate enough telltale markers that someone with the right skills could guess which drug targets they were seeking.
Torrey Path addressed the issue in several ways. The company maintains its own data center, which collects raw scientific data from various sources, including several bioinformatics and cheminformatics laboratories at the University of Michigan. Dresslar says Torrey Path adds value by “curating” the raw data, inserting metadata and assembling information in ways that are more useful to scientists in various disciplines.
The company says it allows more in-depth data analysis, and provides researchers a better view for making scientific decisions about research and development. Torrey Path also provides a version of the product that runs inside a customer’s data center, so its employees’ searches are cloaked from the rest of the Internet. The company also has developed analytical software, which Torrey Paths says allows its customers to identify patterns in “previously intractable data, like gene expression profiles and protein structures.”
As Torrey Path has become more proficient, it has developed premium “content packs” for researchers in specific fields. For example, after releasing an “eye content pack” last year for scientists and doctors specializing in ophthalmology, the company plans this year to release a metabolic content pack, cardiovascular content pack, and neurology content pack.
As Dresslar put it, Torrey Path is developing technology that will enable a customer to say, “bring me all the data results from experiments involving a particular gene.”
Today, Dresslar says, “we’re ready now to bring in VC money, to work with more (scientific) institutions, and bring in some new contracts.” Torrey Path now has six employees, two part-time managers—and a reluctant entrepreneur who yearns for a real corporate HR.
