Assay Depot, a five-year-old startup that provides online e-commerce platforms for contract researchers serving the life sciences industry, says it has raised $1.7 million from private investors. The company launched a public marketplace in 2008 that automates the process of hiring a contract research organization, a job that can take a principal investigator days or even weeks to work out.
Based near San Diego in Solana Beach, CA, Assay Depot also provides a number of private marketplaces (also known as Contract Research Exchanges, or CRXs) and an online “back office” where vendors can respond to work requests and manage orders. The company says it has taken the best features from Amazon, Yelp, and Facebook to build a Web 2.0 platform for the pharmaceutical industry.
Assay Depot says the additional funding from unnamed individual investors will be used to expand its cloud-based pharmaceutical research platform. In a statement, CEO Kevin Lustig says, “Our mission is to empower scientists by giving them two capabilities: the ability to custom create and purchase any research service, and the ability to communicate with experts in any research area.”
As I reported in late 2009, Asset Depot initially raised $1.8 million from friends, family, and individual investors, including Jack Giarraputo, a Hollywood film producer.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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