For immediate release.
October 1, 2018
Columbus, OH — BehaviorCloud announced today that the company has been awarded a $220,420 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from the Office of the Director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will support development of BehaviorCloud’s Bridge technology that enables live data streaming from laboratory instruments to a central cloud repository. BehaviorCloud’s Chief Executive Officer, Derek Edwards, is the principal investigator on this grant. Chief Technology Officer, Christian Lent, and biomedical research advisor, Dr. Tracy Bedrosian, are co-investigators.
“We’re thrilled to receive this funding and support from NIH,” said Derek Edwards. “BehaviorCloud strives to improve collaboration, throughput, and reproducibility in biomedical research. By leveraging cloud data streaming and storage in a fully integrated R&D platform, BehaviorCloud is helping researchers to accelerate scientific discovery and speed drug discovery and development timelines.”
BehaviorCloud is a Software-as-a-Service cloud platform where biomedical researchers can collect, analyze, and share data – focused initially on behavioral and phenotype data from animal models. Researchers have traditionally collected data from many disparate instruments and stored data on dedicated PCs running single license software. Raw data is typically stored across several locations, analysis is restricted to the PC used to collect the data, and opportunities for collaboration, remote-participation, and data sharing are limited. BehaviorCloud is leveraging cloud data streaming and storage to overcome these barriers to discovery. Last year BehaviorCloud released a first version of the underlying cloud platform as well as BehaviorCloud Camera, the first platform add-on that demonstrates automated video tracking of animal behavior on the BehaviorCloud platform using nothing more than a consumer-grade smartphone. This tool and the underlying platform are now in active use across more than 500 academic and pharmaceutical labs.
The Phase I SBIR award will enable BehaviorCloud to develop patent-pending “Bridge” technology that allows live data streaming directly from third-party instrumentation into the existing cloud platform, expanding the capabilities of the offering beyond video tracking to include a range of different behavioral testing methodologies such as photobeam sensors and telemetry. Researchers will bypass the original software and PCs associated with their instruments to control trials through their BehaviorCloud account and receive data back in real-time. In addition, BehaviorCloud will provide a public repository for researchers to deposit results after publication. In the longer term, BehaviorCloud will provide computational tools for predictive analytics and large-scale meta-analysis of data in the repository.
About BehaviorCloud
BehaviorCloud is an early-stage biomedical technology company based in Columbus, OH. Its mission is to advance breakthroughs in human health by providing tools that accelerate and streamline the scientific discovery process. Learn more at www.behaviorcloud.com
Contact Information
Derek Edwards, CEO, BehaviorCloud derek@behaviorcloud.com