Window of opportunity

Malaysian Business,  Jul 1, 2008  by Karim Hercus

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WHEN ASKED ABOUT THE challenges and success in starting up Synamatix Sdn Bhd and its subsidiary, Malaysian Genomics Resource Centre Sdn Bhd (MGRC), many things came to mind. Firstly, how did six years go by so quickly? Secondly, how did we, as a Malaysian bioinformatics company going global, manage to overcome numerous challenges and obstacles? Thirdly, was it due to the uniqueness of the technology, our team, luck, or a combination of all three factors? Through this article, we hope to clarify the key steps, which enabled the development and success of Synamatix and MGRC as global players in bioinformatics.

As with any good idea, ours was set in motion with general interest research at home.

It was in 2000, when the first draft of the human genome was released and the so-called era of "post-genome" bioinformatics began. What started off as mere fascination in applying home-grown algorithms for analysing biological data blossomed into a potentially lucrative business opportunity.

Generating a good idea was relatively easy, but evolving it into a viable business model, which would attract investment, posed our first critical challenge. We needed to translate this idea into good business. Fortunately, we secured funding in 2001 and commenced full operations a year later!

When we launched our range of products in 2004, we fully understood that early market validation was critical and equally challenging to obtain. Scientists in general are sceptical by nature and prefer peer reviewed and published technologies and approaches. This leads, more often than not, to numerous obstacles and lengthy delays for any start-up bioinformatics company, let alone one from Malaysia, a country with no track record in bioinformatics (at the time).

Time to market was critical. Keeping this in mind, we decided to approach leading experts and institutions around the world and ask them to review our technologies. These foremost authorities included David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the United States and Zemin Ning, Head of Database Development at the Sanger Institute, among others. We needed to be absolutely sure that our core intellectual property, the SynaBASE database platform, and its associated high throughput analysis tools were of the highest value to the global research community.

Upon positive feedback, we then made the decision to sell our products abroad. Rather than enter the Malaysian market immediately we targeted top overseas universities, premier research institutions and biotechnology companies to gain credibility and validation. Despite the significant costs in travel and running evaluation programmes in the United States, Europe and Australia, we viewed this step as paramount in taking Synamatix to the next level of global commercialisation.

It has always been our priority to not only secure international credibility and validation for our technology, but to also ensure our offerings can assist in developing and enhancing local research. By doing so, we believed we could play an important role in establishing Malaysia as a significant biotechnology research hub within the region. With this in mind we established MGRC as a bioinformatics portal providing free access to our technology worldwide.

Since early 2005, we have been blessed with commercial success. Our first significant customer was the world's largest and most highly reputed genome institute in the world - the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center (USA), and our first regional customer was the Genome Institute of Singapore.

We have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work closely with many genome research institutions and universities. Their early access to new technologies such as the 454 FLX and Illumina Genome Analyzer has enabled us to become pioneers in bioinformatics analysis for second- generation sequencing platforms. In addition, the agnostic nature of our bioinformatics solutions and their ability to efficiently process and analyse bulk data have provided Synamatix and MGRC with high international profiles. Synamatix and MGRC currently receive invitations to speak at international conferences on a regular basis, such as our recent talk at the Cold Spring Harbour Genome Sequencing Meeting.

In recent months we have become increasingly focused on introducing these new technologies, approaches and know-how to Malaysia. There is a window of opportunity for Malaysian scientists to become pioneers or leaders in their respective fields of research based on these new sequencers. In partnership with our analysis capabilities, the possibilities are endless. Due to significant cost reductions and increased throughput capabilities we now have the opportunity to be the first country in the world to sequence whole genomes or transcriptomes of medicinal plants and the millions of unique microbes found in our tropical forests or even unlocking the DNA coding for specific stress-related genes in important crops. Due to this distinct approach and its potential for discovery and downstream commercialisation opportunities, it is our sincere hope that some of the foreign success realised by Synamatix and MGRC in this field can be emulated in Malaysia.