FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS

According to the two company founders Kenneth Kastaniegaard and Louis Loeb, the idea for the data analysis company Biogenity arose out of a belief that disease control could be done better and more effectively. Today, Biogenity helps small and large companies and research units to carry out and optimize their drug development. By outsourcing the work to Biogenity, customers free up precious time and a cost-effective analysis that is also easily reproducible.

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry and research laboratories have searched for biomarkers, which are unique trends in a specific disease, through the analysis of biological material. According to Kenneth Kastaniegaard, in recent years there has been a development in the biological analysis tools, which provide new and greater insight into biology and create a lot of data. The new insight is positive, but the large amount of data increases the complexity of understanding and extracting knowledge from it. This increases the risk of e.g. to achieve a so-called false-positive result, which can result in investing in the development of diagnostic tools that are ultimately not useful.

- Research has reached a stage where so many highly complex studies are being carried out that the traditional method is obsolete. A need has arisen to analyze data in a new way. Biogenity has therefore developed a ground-breaking product that can simultaneously handle larger data sets, but also convey the biological insight that can be extracted from data, so that it is targeted at the research-related questions. Our goal is to speed up and focus the search for new biomarkers, explains Kenneth Kastaniegaard.

Biomarkers are used to predict, for example, disease. Each set of biomarkers in a data set contains important information about a disease state, which is necessary to develop or test whether a given drug has an effect. Precisely for this reason, it is crucial for the research results to work with large data sets in order to be able to speed up the process towards disease control.

Biogenity's technology opens the door for more researchers to view and interpret diseases on the basis of data, because the automated algorithms handle large parts of the data analysis. That part of the research process is extensive, especially if you are not a trained data scientist.

– Faster analysis of so-called expression data is crucial in research in medicine and health sciences. That is why we work with supervised machine learning to optimize the systems and thus also the work processes in laboratories. Automation can precisely free up time and thus also financial resources. And that is needed to land the good solutions that will benefit patients, industry and of course our healthcare system, says Kenneth Kastaniegaard.

THE ENGINEER AND THE COMMUNICATOR

Kenneth Kastaniegaard and Louis Loeb knew each other before starting Biogenity. They have both studied at AAU. Louis Loeb trained in communication and digital media (BA) and as an information technologist (KA). Kenneth Kastaniegaard chose the research path after studying medical biotechnology. During his PhD studies in biomedical engineering at the Department of Medicine and Health Technology, Kenneth was inspired to translate his research knowledge and experience from the biomedicine laboratory to practice and develop new methods to promote the fight against diseases. He therefore contacted Louis, who had experience with business start-ups.

- The combination of each of our professional profiles has really proven to be decisive for our success. Interdisciplinarity is a strength that is often positively highlighted by our partners and customers and has undoubtedly opened doors for our participation in innovation support programs, says Louis Loeb, adding that Biogenity has accelerated far faster than they could do on their own, thanks to commercialization guidance from AAU, and others.

PREDICTION WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR FUTURE DRUGS

Biogenity won the commercialization initiative Open Entrepreneurship's entrepreneurship award in 2019 and the potential continues to grow. Together with a German partner, Biogenity is currently (year 2020) working on a new proof-of-concept project, which deals with the prediction of antibodies using artificial intelligence. An antibody produced by the immune system can neutralize hostile elements such as viruses, bacteria and cancer.