Cloud service helps labs manage data

At the age of 7, while other kids were fiddling with Legos, Jonathan Hirsch found himself at a university lab learning the basics behind putting fluid in pipettes and making gels. Five years later, Hirsch began conducting pharmacology experiments.

It’s the sort of thing that can happen when much of your immediate family is made up of university researchers and doctors performing clinical trials.

“I’ve just always loved doing research,” said Hirsch, now 27.

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Hirsch focused on biology and then honed his neuroscience chops while getting a master’s degree from Stanford University. He also worked at Avocet Polymer Technologies and Abbott Laboratories — a pair of pharmaceutical companies.

Hirsch grew frustrated by the antiquated technology tools at the disposal of researchers and doctors. They kept track of drug trials with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides. When new results arrived, the researchers updates information manually.

“There was just such poor use of information,” Hirsch said.

In 2008, Hirsch decided to leave the laboratory and start a company to fix the problems he saw. He and a handful of young, like-minded scientists and engineers formed Syapse, a startup that would create a cloud-computing service aimed at biotech and pharmaceutical companies, scientists and doctors. The goal was to provide these groups a contemporary way to manage data gathered through experiments and trials and to analyze that information.

“All of the people in our company are young scientists who grew up with Facebook, Basecamp and LinkedIn,” Hirsch said. “We know what modern Web software can do to help us organize our lives.”

Syapse has built a layer of software that helps organizations collect and categorize data from a wide variety of scientific instruments, and to structure the data in a common way. It then sells services tailored for specific tasks on top of that core product. One of the first is called Discovery, designed to collect and analyze genetic data.

“A scientist can do research on a set of patients and specimens and set up a sequencing workflow that will keep track of the results,” Hirsch said. “He can then tie the results into studies on related gene sequences and generate reports based on the data.”

Dozens of universities have received access to the service for free as part of the company’s plan to train young scientists on the software, and there are more than a handful of corporate users as well. The software starts at about $18,000 a year for a small startup and can go up to $500,000 a year for large companies with lots of people tapping into the service.

Hirsch sees Syapse turning into something akin to the Windows of the drug world. He’d like the service to connect companies developing the drugs to the doctors prescribing them, creating an unbroken chain of data and analysis.

Syapse, with six employees, is seeking funding. It has already raised some money from angel investors, including its Chief Executive Officer Glenn Winokur, a software industry veteran. Hirsch, the company’s president, has largely paid his own way during the years spent developing the initial product.

“I took all the money I earned from the earlier stuff and put it into Apple stock,” he said. “That’s how I support myself. I was fortunate.”