Kevin Davies

Biography

September 15, 2009 | From humble beginnings in 2005, Danish software company CLC bio has emerged as one of the leading software providers for the exploding genomics and next-gen sequencing market. The Danes say they aim to be “among the most innovative bioinformatics companies in the 21st century.” After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Florida, Bjarne Knudsen saw a business opportunity to improve the quality, efficiency, and user-friendliness of life science software. He returned to Denmark, recruited his brother Thomas (now CLC bio’s CEO) to the cause, hired a few local software developers, and CLC bio was born. The origin of the name is a closely guarded secret. “‘Cake Loving Company’ is a good guess, but it’s incorrect,” says CLC bio North America CEO Jan Lomholdt. CLC bio initially took a “Microsoft approach” to bioinformatics. “Everyone has to have it on their desktop, download it from the Internet. It was global thinking from the beginning,” says Lomholdt. The resulting Workbench suite, going to head to head with the likes of DNASTAR, Vector NTI, and Gene Codes, proved competitive. It was platform independent and “people could just right-click and get [GenBank] directly into their program,” says Lomholdt. By 2006, CLC bio had serviced 100,000 free downloads. Adding more functionality, CLC bio attracted its first industry customers. With next-gen sequencing platforms emerging, Lomholdt and colleagues worked with the major vendors—Roche/454, Illumina, Applied Biosystems (AB), and Helicos—to ensure it could handle all types of sequence data. Released in 2008 at the Bio-IT World Expo, the Genomics Workbench operates as a desktop application for next-gen sequencing analyses. Early this year, CLC bio added a three-tier server architecture with CLC Genomics Server, providing a server structure for CPU-intensive jobs, a database component, and the ability to use Genomics Workbench as a thick client and develop and execute customized plug-ins centrally. Lomholdt says that the major next-gen platforms are “very good in hardware technology [but] they are not good in doing software—and they know it. Customers demand downstream analysis. When we said, ‘Hey, we can do this,’ they said, ‘Finally, there is one we can point to when the customer gets mad!’” Lomholdt admits that CLC bio was a little late in supporting AB’s color space, but does now support SOLiD data. Moreover, the vendors recognize that many customers use multiple platforms. “We can be the one that merges their different datasets,” says Lomholdt. “We can handle long or short reads and merge them to get a higher quality result.”

Research Interest

Business