Company Profile:
Assay Depot
Assay Depot is using the power of the Internet to create a new model for scientific research. The company operates an online network of science marketplaces that connects buyers and sellers of research services and enables scientists to create any research service imaginable. By making it possible to easily order any research service online, Assay Depot enables entire drug research projects to be carried out without direct access to a laboratory. Scientists can now use their laptops and mobile phones to create and run multiple complex experiments in parallel. For large research organizations, Assay Depot has created private marketplaces that serve as a vendor relationship management (VRM) system and e-commerce platform. Company researchers can view institutional knowledge, request quotes, ask questions, compare services, place orders, rate vendors, and more, all from one highly secure website. Assay Depot has installed private marketplaces at four of the top ten pharmaceutical companies and the US National Cancer Institute. Assay Depot is fundamentally changing how scientific research is sourced and managed. By simplifying access to experts and services, the company is dramatically lowering barriers to scientific innovation and ushering in a new, cost-effective approach to research.
Q: Please tell us how your business idea was conceived. Was there an "aha" moment or did it evolve gradually?
A: We founded the company with the goal of offering cancer cell screening services to the medical research community. When we showed a friend the ecommerce site we had built to take online orders, his first question was whether he could sell his company’s services on our site too. My co-founder and I looked at each other and in an “aha moment” decided to change our business model. We pivoted the company, sold the laboratory, and became Assay Depot, “the Amazon.com for medical research.”
Q: What's the most inventive, innovative, or disruptive aspect of your initiative?
A: By making available all of the tools of modern medical research to anyone who wants to make use of them, Assay Depot has in essence taken medical research out of the hands of a few massive corporations and placed it squarely in the hands of anyone – from an academic scientist pursuing a hunch, to a concerned parent of a sick child, to a forward thinking high school student who dreams of changing the world. Research can now be performed externally, on-demand and at lower cost than before, all of the key elements needed for a radically improved drug research process. We believe Assay Depot could be as disruptive to the drug discovery market as Amazon was to the consumer retail market. But instead of changing the way we buy books we are changing the way we cure disease.
Q: How will it help people live to their greatest potential or contribute to making the world healthier?
A: Hundreds of millions of people still die every year from cancer, stroke, and other diseases that will one day be curable. By democratizing access to life science research tools, Assay Depot is helping create a radically improved research ecosystem that can dramatically speed up the drug discovery process and get new drugs to market sooner. It is our hope that by empowering all scientists, professional and citizen, we will ultimately help solve many of the challenging medical diseases facing our world, and enable millions to live who would have otherwise been lost.
Q: Five years from now, what would you like to be able to say has been your most important contribution to health?
A: Five years from now, we would like to say that our platform is being used by thousands of small companies and citizen scientists to deliver high quality drug candidates to the clinic at costs 10-fold lower than possible today. We want to say that running a drug research program used to require the coordinated effort of hundreds of researchers but that today, using Assay Depot, a handful of scientists can create a virtual company capable of going from concept to clinic.
Q: What single word or phrase best describes the culture of your startup and why?
A: Connection. Assay Depot is a global online marketplace that connects or matches scientists in more than 100 countries worldwide. While our main office is located in San Diego, our company is largely virtual with employees and consultants spread across the world. Our employees often connect with a scientist in the French Alps in the morning, a Boston biotech in the afternoon and a subscribing vendor in China in the evening.