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hdotrich-blog-blog · 13 years ago

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Trapit is one of the key tools that I use, actually, every day at my job. It’s a marketer’s dream tool.

User: Mahni Ghorashi, MBA Location: Redwood Shores, California Official Title: Director of Strategic Programs, Bina Technologies Favorite Featured Trap: Genomics

Q: Greetings, Mahni! Tell us a little bit about who you are.

I’d probably say I’m an interdisciplinary individual, with a lot of different interests in my life. I attended MIT as an undergrad and almost went down the astrophysics route (until the math clobbered me), and then Yale for a Ph.D. program in literature. I came to Silicon Valley after leaving the Ph.D. program at Yale, and worked for a variety of startups after that. I had been working in a hi-tech, entrepreneurial setting before going back to school to get my MBA at Vanderbilt.

Q: How did you get to where you are today?

I knew I wanted to come back to the Bay Area after I finished school. I had been following Bina since about halfway through my MBA program, and I had met Narges Bani Asadi. And so Narges was a Ph.D. student at Stanford, working at the interface of bioinformatics and genomics. She went on to co-found Bina Technologies, where she’s the CEO. Bina is where I work now, as the Director of Strategic Programs.

Q: What is genomics, and what about it is important for all of us?

Your DNA sequence is made up of three billion base pairs, and that determines your genetic makeup. We want to be able to look at your genetic profile and find out what diseases you may develop in old age, what mutations in your genome may wind up causing cancer, and this is difficult because there are many, many types of mutations that may result in causing cancer.

Q: Is that what people mean when they say “personalized medicine”?

Personalized medicine is really the holy grail of genomics. The goal is to take your DNA sequence, be able to interpret it in a meaningful and clinically applicable way, and then deliver clinical care in a way that’s targeted to your particular genetic profile. So cancer patients are getting their DNA sequenced, and clinical oncologists are looking at what particular therapies or treatments can best address that particular type of cancer.

Q: So why would someone want their genome sequenced when it comes to health and medicine?

For example, even though it appears that cancers in the lung and in the pancreas are completely different, the mutations that underlie those cancers may be the same, and so the treatment that’s effective for one winds up being tremendously effective at treating the other. This is something we never would have found out without whole-genome sequencing.

This is also applicable to newborns; we can sequence their entire genomes and determine what diseases they may be susceptible to later in life. We can dramatically improve their quality of life. In parallel to this whole revolution in genomics, there’s another revolution in gene therapy that’s trying to address these genetic mutations and provide therapeutic treatment in that regard.

Q: Then you’ve got to figure out, for each individual person, what their 3-billion-base-pair DNA code is. How does whole-genome sequencing happen?

The first step in genome analysis is DNA sequencing, and there are big firms that are expert DNA sequencers, but they sequence your DNA in only a few hundred base pairs at a time. What they’re delivering is hundreds of millions of fragments of your whole DNA. To put that together, that’s an amazingly complex process to put together these “reads” in a logical way, to identify aspects of your DNA that might have mutations or exceptions in code.

Q: So “sequencing your genome” isn’t the end of the story, is it?

There’s an enormous amount of secondary analysis that has to take place to make sense of this sequencing data and build a complete genotypic profile. It’s incredibly computationally intense, it’s costly, and it’s time-consuming as well.

To put things in perspective, the Human Genome Project — completed in 2003 — took 13 years to complete, and cost $3 billion to sequence just one human. Today, we can sequence a human genome in 24 hours for about $3,000. However, it still takes about 2 weeks to take that raw data and assemble your genetic profile.

Q: So you’re given a “DNA sequence,” but to complete the analysis, you’ve then got a “big data” problem when it comes to assembling this genetic profile?

This is where Bina comes in, with our unique combination of high-performance computing expertise combined with our proprietary statistical algorithms and optimized software. We provide dramatic improvements in the cost, accuracy, and speed of data analysis. At Bina, we’ve been able to cut that time down — those two weeks after the sequencing to the assembly of a complete genetic profile — to just three hours, a factor of 100 faster than our competitors.

Q: What does this mean for, say, the bottom line of a cancer patient?

For a cancer genome diagnosis, the entire process — getting your genome sequenced, doing the secondary analysis to assemble your genetic profile and identify the structural changes that can occur in a genetic profile, and translate that data into something that can be clinically diagnosed as far as identifying a course of treatment for a patient — can run anywhere between $25,000 to $100,000. It’s extremely cost-prohibitive, not covered by insurance, and only available to a small fraction of the population.

The goal of Bina is to speed up that analysis and reduce those costs, all while actually increasing the overall accuracy. When you’re talking about 3 billion base pairs, one nucleotide replacement can have a huge impact on the analysis of data. Bina has really hit upon this problem well; we truly assemble a low-cost, quick, and accurate genetic profile. Those are three areas where we truly represent a huge upgrade over the other competitors out there. The net result is going to be a large reduction in the time and cost, making the treatments available to a wide variety of new patients.

Q: So how long is it going to be before this reduced cost, faster and more accurate genome analysis is available to everyone?

We have two pilot studies at Stanford University and the Stanford VA hospital. There’s a 100x speedup in time and a 1000x reduction in data, and the company’s getting ready to attack this problem on a bigger scale.

We also have the right interdisciplinary team in place. We have a team of high-performance computing experts, a team of genomics or bioinformatics experts, and a team of experts in statistical analysis. We pulled from these three different fields to assemble the team that can really pull this off. Bina has also recruited Mark Sutherland, a veteran of the life sciences industry, to head its commercial operations.

Q: And you’re the Director of Strategic Programs for Bina. What does your job consist of?

My responsibilities kind of span a couple of different fields: marketing is one of them, business development is the other. What we are looking at is how Bina can play a role in not only genomic sequencing in research centers, but also in clinical markets and diagnostic markets.

Q: It sounds like there’s a lot of searching, scouring and filtering for information that comes along with that job. How do you manage that monumental task?

Well, Trapit is one of the key tools that I use, actually, every day at my job. It’s a marketer’s dream tool. It’s the first place I go to every morning, to comb through information in the genomics market, the bioinformatics space, the field of DNA sequencing, as well as the other mainstream publications. I get caught up on competitors, on the market space, and on technology development in the space.

Rather than me having to go to hundreds of potential sources, I can really curate content and have it come to me in a very reliable, quick and easy-to-sift-through format. It’s sort of my command-central, if you will.

Q: A “marketer’s dream tool” is very high praise. In what ways have you found it helpful?

Trapit has been invaluable in unearthing market stories that I might have otherwise certainly missed, along with players in our space operating under the radar that we now know about. I think it’s the ideal platform for anyone doing marketing work — the ultimate strategic marketing tool — and is my first stop every morning to get the critical information I need to stay abreast of industry developments.

Q: And for the field of genome analysis in particular?

I use Trapit every day for my job, to scour the web for relevant market data, trending stories in the NGS (next-generation sequencing) space, competitive analysis, and for looking at stories downstream from us in DNA tertiary analysis/clinical applications.

Q: How would you describe the ease-of-use of Trapit? How long did it take before we were delivering the type of content you were looking for?

The traps have been amazingly easy to personalize and train, just by liking and disliking articles to make them better. In a very short amount of time, I can customize a trap to my own specifications, and have it delivering the real-time content I can’t get from any other competitor.

As you can imagine, this is a really specialized space, and using Trapit for bioinformatics or combining search terms such as whole-genome sequencing and bioinformatics, I can get an explicit content stream on exactly what it is I’m looking for.

Q: Do you have a favorite featured trap?

Although the genomics trap is really great, I can take that a step further by creating my own content. And I can really focus in on exactly the explicit type of information I’m looking for, and Trapit delivers it right to me on a daily basis.

Q: Outside of work, where would we be likely find you?

Outside of Bina, I’m a committed classical pianist and a fanatic about music and the arts. When not at work, you can almost always find me at the San Francisco Symphony or SF Opera attending a performance, or at home practicing piano. Music is my passion, and I think that creativity transfers over to the entrepreneurial space and helping to build companies from the ground up.

Q: And have you made any personal traps that you’ve found useful, unique or interesting?

Yes; absolutely! I use Trapit for some of my music interests: piano, opera, classical music, and following specific performers — as well as other industries — on a personal basis.

Q: Thanks for being such a wonderful user profile for Trapit; is there anything you’d like to add?

I think this is great; thank you so much for taking the time to do this!

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