Hamilton software company mines the US pharmaceutical market

By ADAM GIFFORD

Hamilton data-mining software company Reel Two has signed a three-year agreement worth more than $1 million with Gene Ed, a United States provider of electronic courses in life sciences.

Michael Faust, Reel Two's San Francisco-based chief executive, said Gene Ed's business was to create courses for companies like Glaxo Smith-Kline, Pfizer and Astra Zeneca.

He said an example of Gene Ed's work would be for it to develop a course on heart disease for sales people trying to sell a new heart drug.

He said Gene Ed would use Reel Two's Kea predictive engine to help handle its own business and would also resell pharmaceutical and bio-specific data-mining solutions.

He said that by using Reel Two's Kea technology to analyse their data, drug companies could bring down the time and cost involved in developing drugs.

Reel Two had developed proprietary algorithms that could very quickly analyse and predict data.

He said that rather than building a generic application, Reel Two had tried to identify areas with information overload where the client saw there was value in using that data to extract usable information. That was why it had focused on the life sciences and pharmaceuticals areas.

Mr Faust said life sciences was a hard area to break into, and Gene Ed had the connections that Reel Two needed.

Power generation was another area in which Reel Two believed its data-mining tools could deliver competitive advantages.

Seven of Reel Two's 10 staff were involved in Waikato University's research into Machine learning and information technology. Six have doctorates from the university.

They all previously worked for a US firm called Webmind, which had attempted to develop artificial intelligence products.

"The machine learning group at Waikato University is up there with Carnegie Mellon and Amherst as the top of that field in the world," Mr Faust said. "When we decided to start this company, I was impressed by the academic background of these guys plus the pragmatic, innovative approach they take down here. That's important when we don't have the sort of resources our competitors have to throw at these problems, and we needed to get a real product developed as quickly as possible."

Reel Two is financed by an American angel investor, staff contributions and its own sales.

Mr Faust said the company expected to make an profit in the next quarter. "We might have picked the toughest time to start a technology company but we have a strong product."

Reel Two

Gene Ed