Startup comes out of gate with burst of speed

The biggest problem facing Cartesian Gridspeed chief executive Leonard Bloksberg is convincing people his technology is for real.

The Auckland startup company's flagship product is Slim Search software, which is designed to help scientists look for particular genes involved in treatment of diseases and for understanding how drugs work.

Bloksberg makes the bold claim that Slim can search gene databases 10,000 times faster than the industry's most commonly used tool, Blast.

Slim, he says, can process every known gene from every sequenced organism in less than a day on a single PC. It's a task that previously took years on billion-dollar supercomputers, he says.

"In a world where most people are talking about 10 per cent faster ... it's just off the scale."

Bloksberg plans to start selling Slim internationally next year for US$40,000 ($57,000). Cartesian is offering the software to New Zealand firms at a hefty discount and has signed up Waikato University and the Bioinformatics Institute.

Slim's speed improvement over Blast may be difficult to quantify, but Brian Ward, chief executive of industry body NZBio, says Cartesian could hit it big if it can deliver on its claim.

"In this game, being able to make discoveries quicker and establish a proprietary position around that is very important," he says.

Bloksberg began developing the technology while working for Genesis Research in 2002. Genesis wanted to access a new forestry genome and the preliminary search was going to take 20 years on a $250,000 computer, he says.

"I worked with some programmers ... to find a way to do it faster, and we got the job done in nine hours on an old Pentium 3. That is how Slim Search was born."

Genesis thus gained access to genes years ahead of international competition "because it took the United States team two years to process those sequences on its US$500 million computer cluster", he says.

Genesis disbanded its bioinformatics team last year, and Bloksberg formed Cartesian in April. He has received $100,000 from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology to commercialise the software.

To help build Slim, Bloksberg contracted data-mining specialist Reel Two, a US company with a development office in Hamilton. In addition to writing code, Reel Two can change how the programming language handles that code, "which is something most programmers don't even know is possible".

To maximise the lifespan of the product, Bloksberg says, Cartesian must get to market quickly.

"I don't think we have the leisure to waste time just thinking about it. We need to get the thing out there, get it in the market and dominate the market."

The product is being targeted at biomedical and agricultural industries where scientists run routine monitoring of gene databases on clustered personal computers.

Using Slim can also save companies thousands in electricity costs, Bloksberg says, since a single computer is used rather than hundreds. The product could open new areas of research into gene interaction.

"The old model of just taking one gene and doing a search to see what it does doesn't really cut it anymore," he says.

"If you've got a pile of data sitting on a computer on a hard disk it doesn't jump out and say, 'I'm the new cure for cancer' ... You have to find them."

CARTESIAN GRIDSPEED

Who: Chief executive Leonard Bloksberg.

Where: Auckland.

What: Biotechnology sector software for cheaper and faster searching of gene databases.

Why: "I wanted to have some kind of job that allowed me to give something back to the world."