When Ontario Minister of Innovation Glen Murray
announced a new data initiative at MaRS last month, he was long on hype with the announcement (he said he expected it to be "one of the most important things I'll ever be involved in in my life") and short on details (though he said the initiative would be fully-funded, he also explained it would be "rolled out" over the next several months).
But he did name check a specific inspiration: Toronto's 1DegreeBio, which has already launched a world-leading data sharing initiative for the biological sciences sector. The company was founded in July 2009 and launched online in June 2010 as the world's first online independent resource listing all academic and commercially available antibodies.
"I used to work in a large research lab in Toronto," says founder Alex Hodgson, "and what I noticed is that researchers were buying multiple versions of antibdies because they were never sure which ones were crap. There was no central resource, no quality control�you can't do great research with crap antibodies."
After finishing her MBA, she created 1DegreeBio with an open source spirit and social media techniques inspired by online retailers such as TripAdvisor and Amazon.com. 1DegreeBio offers a method of sharing information to eliminate costly overlapping in the research community, it connects various companies and scientists with the results of their peers and through user reviews. Less than a year after launching, the site now offers "just under 500,000 antibody products," and has grown from two employees working from Hodgson's home office to six employees in a new office.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Alex Hodgson, Managing Director, 1DegreeBio