Company News: Open Source Expert Joins BioAnalyte [Press Release]
March 18, 2005. Portland, ME - BioAnalyte announced today that noted Open Source expert Vance Wheelock II has joined the company to consult on e-commerce solutions and to help propel the company's revolutionary software licensing technology into the $8 billion analytical instruments marketplace.
Wheelock will enable the automated, on-demand creation, distribution and revenue collection for BioAnalyte's proprietary proNets™ licenses. The licenses permit analytical instruments users to process gigabyte datasets using BioAnalyte's Trawler products. In 2004, BioAnalyte ProTrawler™ helped the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in College Park, MD, to discover a protein biomarker for a deadly food-borne bacterium similar to the one that causes cholera.
"Selling proNets to a ProTrawler installation is akin to selling a hit song to an MP3 player, but with a better post-sale license strategy," said Peter Leopold, president of BioAnalyte. "On-line theater tickets are an expiring version of the same on-demand licensing technology. The costs are all about the same - under $100 - but with a proNet you can discover a diagnostic protein biomarker."
Similar capabilities from a major server consultant such as IBM would cost tens of thousands of dollars, but Wheelock's experience in Open Source tools will reduce over-all development costs dramatically without sacrificing the technical details.
"We've known for some time that Open Source solutions are the way to go, but feasible strategies cannot be gleaned from the Open Source manuals and a few newsgroup postings," Leopold said. "Vance's experience with on-demand web-based solutions brings us to the forefront of 'best practices'."
The move to bolster e-commerce comes on the heels of the BioAnalyte's decision to broaden its license agreement with Positive Probability Ltd, a UK-based provider of advanced data analysis algorithms, and to sell its laboratory operations.
Wheelock, a Winthrop resident, is a 1996 computer science and mathematics graduate of the University of Maine, Farmington. Wheelock co founded the Maine Linux User Group in 1995, and founded the MESDA-sponsored Southern Maine Linux Users Group in 2000. Until last fall, Wheelock was the lead web developer for Blue Marble Geographics, a Gardiner-based mapping software company.
"Vance's experience in global positioning systems and mapping software qualifies him to approach the enormity of the bioinformatics data problem," Leopold said.
About BioAnalyte, Inc.
Founded in Portland in 2001, BioAnalyte is a Portland-based biomarker discovery partner company. It develops cross-platform software tools to facilitate high-speed interpretation of the torrent of proteomics and genomic data made possible by contemporary instrumentation. BioAnalyte's ProTrawler™ was developed in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. ProTrawler™ helped the FDA discover a protein biomarker for a deadly food-borne bacterium similar to the one that causes cholera.