Novel licencing system allows the software to analyse individual data sets; users pay once and analyse many times on one computer or several
BioAnalyte has released its flagship software under what it says is a revolutionary software licence that binds the product to data.
The product, ProteinTrawler, is a tool for the rapid reduction of gigabyte-size raw scientific data sets to manageable lists of potential biomarkers, or diagnostic indicators of disease.
The new Pronets licence allows the ProteinTrawler software to analyse individual data sets.
Users pay once and analyse many times on one computer or several.
"We've taken $10,000 software and have found out how to sell it $15 at a time and increase revenues by a factor of 100" said Peter Leopold, president of BioAnalyte.
Vladimir Georgiev, BioAnalyte's software production manager, commented that the 'monolithic' nature of biotech data makes the licence scheme possible.
"We couldn't do this for a text editor, but we can for a two-hour chromatogram that contains 40 million individual measurements".
The Pronets licence as a business model is aided by FDA requirements for data integrity, Leopold added.
"Our new licence enforces data integrity while promoting the sharing of scientific data between colleagues", Leopold said.
Fellow researchers download ProteinTrawler for free.
Then, one scientist buys a Pronets licence, which is copied with the data set to all participants in the research group.
The licence will help BioAnalyte circulate its brand in a $23 billion R and D industry where scientists spend more money on low-end consumables than on high-end software and hardware tools.
BioAnalyte anticipates sales of $35 million based on this licence strategy alone.
"We think we can penetrate the laboratory instrument install base 1000%," Leopold said, pointing out that sharable licences will encourage dissemination of his company's software.
ProteinTrawler is designed to analyse a variety of data formats.
"ProteinTrawler is instrument agnostic," Leopold said.
"In an industry dominated by billion dollar companies, it is important not to play favourites".
The dominant instrument companies include American firms Agilent, Applied BioSystems, Waters, Varian, and Thermo as well as Japanese companies Shimadzu and JEOL, and German company Bruker.
Stillwater Instruments is entering the same market place with a new mass spectrometer.
Leopold commented that ProteinTrawler's portability moves the vendors' value proposition from hardware-and-software back to hardware-only.
One long-time BioAnalyte customer considered changing his million-dollar instrument purchase order from the traditional vendor to a new higher quality instrument as long as he can take ProteinTrawler with him, he added.
"We seem to be able to affect instrument sales," Leopold said.
In 2004, ProteinTrawler helped the FDA discover a protein weight about 9000 daltons that acts as a diagnostic biomarker for Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a cousin of cholera that contaminates shellfish and kills people.
The key to wide acceptance is adoption by so-called core facilities, departments at universities and research centres responsible for maintaining and using analytical instrumentation.
Core facilities analyse samples from all over the institution on a fee-for-service basis.
Leopold called the Pronets licence a triple win for core facilities managers.
"Core managers will hand enterprise-quality software to their users for a tiny fraction of the cost of a traditional licence," Leopold said.
"Moreover, they will profit from the re-sale of a Pronets licence while pushing back some of the data analytical work on the scientists who ordered the samples to be analysed".
BioAnalyte will formally announce the Pronets licence for ProteinTrawler at the 2005 American Society of Mass Spectrometry Meeting in San Antonio in June 2005.
ProteinTrawler uses the Respect data reconstruction algorithm from BioAnalyte's partners at Positive Probability, a mathematical software firm based in the UK.
