Just a few weeks after we reported Torrey Path’s arrival in La Jolla, another bioinformatics company is setting up shop San Diego. Dotmatics, a scientific visualization and bioinformatics software developer founded in the United Kingdom, has opened an office near San Diego as part of an expansion that targets the U.S. life sciences market.
“Now with an expanding team we were finally at a point where we needed a US office,” Dotmatics CEO and co-founder Stephen Gallagher told me last night in an e-mail from Dotmatics headquarters north of London. “We always had an eye on San Diego because it would help cover a wider territory and because of the great history of biotechnology in the area. Another real attraction was the mix of small biotech, start-ups, major pharmaceuticals, research institutes and contract research companies, all of whom are our potential customers or partners.”
San Diego also has better beaches than Boston, Gallagher said with an emoticon :) smile. “As a hotbed of biotechnology and with real enthusiasm for innovative technology,” he added, “San Diego was the perfect choice for Dotmatics.”
Gallagher co-founded the company in 2005 as a spin-out from the pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme. “We acquired some scientific software from the company which had been developed specifically to help scientists interact and make the most of their data and knowledge. We knew immediately that this software would be very attractive to other organizations,” Gallagher said.
Dotmatics enables researchers at biotechs and other organizations show and use their information more efficiently, and its web browser can present scientific data efficiently in a desktop. They also have database and analytics platforms, and registration systems for scientists and scientific groups.
Gallagher says they initially started to work with small biotechs but discovered that big pharma also needs their tools. Dotmatics’ new U.S. office is in Del Mar, CA, an affluent coastal community surrounded by more than 500 pharma and biotech companies.