Here we are in that funny week at the end of the year, when the projects have mostly wrapped up and we take a breather and look at both the year behind and the year ahead. In short, 2018 has been an amazing, exciting year with a lot of work and a lot of success. I’d like to share a little bit of that with all of you.
Over the course of the past twelve months, Diamond Age has served a wide variety of clients from across the therapeutics discovery space, in metabolic disease, hearing loss, neuroscience, cancer and many more. We’ve continued our work in using genomics to support discovery biology and drug development and expanded into building data processing pipelines, developing analysis methods and doing technology transfer. Beyond therapeutics, we have moved into biotechnology and diagnostics, assisting our clients with data analysis for process improvement and streamlining.
All of this work meant that we needed to expand the team. In July, Chris Friedline joined us, bringing with him extensive experience in sequencing, evolutionary biology, information technology and software engineering / infrastructure. In August, Somdutta Saha brought to the team chemistry, cheminformatics, microbiome analysis and drug discovery/development experience.
In December, we presented at the North Shore Technology Council’s First Friday seminar series. We talked about how to hire computational biology folks, how bioinformatics relates to data science, and using machine learning and AI in discovery biology. We co-presented with Huseyin Mehmet from Zafgen, Inc; he described how Diamond Age helps Zafgen get its data analysis needs met efficiently, and what makes a good collaboration with a bioinformatics team. Check out the slides if you’d like to learn more.
As for the year ahead, 2019 looks to me like another year of exciting work with great companies, and perhaps some even more interesting developments, besides. I want to say a personal thank you to everyone at Diamond Age, plus all of our clients and our supporters. There is certainly more to come.
–Eleanor