Rohan Mathawan
Manoj Gopalkrishnan- CEO and Founder of Algorithmic Biologics
Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.
Algorithmic Biologics is a deep tech platform technology company. Our product Tapestry is a molecular search solution that applies techniques from AI on genomic data using our patented and proprietary approach. There are many applications that can be built on top of molecular search, ranging from screening for infectious diseases to gene mutations to identifying proteins with desired traits etc. We provide customized solution to our enterprise customers based on the specific application that is of interest to them. We also provide training to clinicians to use our software, report generation services, and necessary technical support on an ongoing basis.
Who are some of the top industries/sectors adopting molecular testing analysis?
Molecular Testing is a $62 Billion horizontal business that services multiple verticals including Industrial Microbiology & Pharmaceuticals, Food Safety, and Molecular Diagnostics. A significant and most rapidly growing segment of this market is software for scale multiplication that reduces the complexity, effort, and cost of genomic testing. In the future, we will see molecular information driving decision-making for many industries, and the demand for molecular technologies increase rapidly. This will be driven by data science and by more affordable, and more accurate testing. We believe that molecular technology will reinvent healthcare, food, and pharma, but it won’t stop there. It will also reinvent chemicals, textiles, energy, and climate.
Do share some updates on your client base and the work you have been doing lately?
Our key customers are diagnostic and industrial labs, genomic core facilities and service providers who benefit from increasing either throughput or volumes without incurring any additional capital investment. We provide them “scale multiplication” on their installed capacity through our software-only solution. Traditionally such scale multiplication is offered through automation hardware, novel chemistry, and biologics, or algorithm-based efficiencies supported by the software. We are in the third category, which has the advantages of being low capital cost and easy solution delivery through the cloud. The uniqueness of our solution lies in us being an AI-enabled SaaS solution that is independent of the underlying molecular test. This space is greenfield and ripe for a huge growth spurt like we have seen in AI-based medical imaging in the last five years.
What is the technology stack involved in the analysis?
We do modelling of the underlying molecular assays based on fundamental science and convert these models to software. We use these models to drive our inference engines and decision-making. The whole solution is hosted on the cloud and delivered via our web app.
Can you please elaborate on your business strategy and growth plans? Where do you see your company in the coming years?
We want to reinvent molecular testing by bringing intelligence to molecules. We are making accurate molecular testing available at scale. In the coming years, Algorithmic Biologics will bring the power of molecular information to the lives of billions of people. We have an R&D pipeline to innovate and take the innovations to industrial applications. This includes running joint pilots with industry leaders to prove commercial benefits to customers. We often work with channel partners to scale up the product while we stay engaged for customer success.
What do you think will be the driving factors behind the adoption of the molecular testing market?
The increasing prevalence of diseases leading to severe infectious diseases is fueling the growth of the molecular diagnostics market. Also, factors such as the move towards wellness and the rise in demand for personalized care based on genomic analysis are expected to augment the market. The strong growth of molecular diagnostics can also be attributed to the government’s focus on healthcare investments, enhancing the biotechnology sector, and increasing the number of biotechnology companies in the country.
How has the adoption of molecular technology in India/US evolved over the last few years?
Covid played a major role in increasing the installed base, expertise and awareness about molecular and genomic testing. The availability of PCR testing kits more than doubled and the same can now be leveraged for other infectious diseases. The genomic testing cost has continued to come down and is now being used for mainstream applications at an increasing pace. We believe our innovation allows for genomic testing to be more versatile as well as affordable.
How can your business model impact Indian society, lives, and communities?
High price of genomic and molecular testing has long prevented life savings tests from being universally available. In industries, lack of sufficient testing has led to poor standards of quality assurance. By ensuring we use software-based methods on top of gold-standard tests to make them affordable, we can increase the adoption of molecular and genomic testing which can translate into reducing mortality and morbidity in case of healthcare and availability of better quality products in case of products we consume, including food. In the research context, it also means accelerating the innovation without being bottlenecked by budget constraints since discovery assays feed the life science innovation pipeline but need to use cutting-edge technologies that are prohibitively expensive. We allow genomic and molecular testing to be used at scale across sectors without breaking the bank.