Next Generation Sequencing

As part of the local government’s initiative to identify, support, and promote successful start-up companies in and around the city of Aarhus, the Mayor, Nicolai Wammen, stopped by our offices last week and met with the founding brothers of CLC bio.

CEO at CLC bio, Thomas Knudsen - Mayor of Aarhus, Nicolai Wammen - CSO at CLC bio, Bjarne Knudsen

The meeting was very positive and the Mayor found the story and the strategies behind building CLC bio since 2005, very intriguing.

In coordination with CLC bio being recognized as a successful local startup in Aarhus - and now turned into a profitable global company with a massive growth and 98% export - our CEO, Thomas Knudsen, will present our story as a source of inspiration for all the new entrepreneurs, when the most promising new local startups are rewarded at the municipal hall on May 25th.

Not all our customers are aware of our CLC Developer Kit - a free and open API to customize and create your own features and algorithms that plug right in to our line of workbenches or on our server. However, there is a lot of programmers, bioinformaticians, and biologists with coding expertise that use our API to create their own plugins. And just recently we passed an impressive number of 1000 registered developers on our developer forum: http://www.clcdeveloper.com

We wanted to celebrate that, so we contacted the 1000th developer who registered - Raimundas Ražanskas, PhD, from the Institute of Biotechnology at the Vilnius University in Lithuania - and invited him for a trip to our headquarters in Denmark, all expenses paid! In Aarhus, he got to meet our Director of Enterprise Solutions & Worldwide Developer Relations, Mikael Flensborg, who is the chief architect behind our API.

Raimundas Ražanskas states:

First of all, I’m not a bioinformatician but a molecular biologist - but I do some small software and scripts now and then, and plan to do more coding and data analysis in the future, as the Vilnius University is planning to acquire a next generation sequencer. My idea is to add some specific features to CLC bio’s workbench, which is why I registered on clcdeveloper.com

Mikael Flensborg, continues:

I have visited a lot of institutions everywhere in the world and done workshops on our API, and it’s really positive to see the interest for developing customized plugins. As a company we know we can’t cover every feature and algorithm that all the scientists in the world want to do, so in that respect we really want to encourage researchers to do this on their own - and with some coding experience it’s relatively straightforward. For commercial software companies, using our API is also an excellent opportunity to reach a wide audience of CLC bio software installations - like for example Omixon have done.

Raimundas Ražanskas rounds off by stating:

Visting CLC bio is a very good experience and the company has many young and motivated specialists, and obviously they make very good software. I like it here in Aarhus!

As you could read in a press release a couple of weeks ago, we have two new offices in the US. Our US headquarter in Cmabridge, Boston, moved to a new location - literally just around the corner - and have a lot more space now, so we have room for all the people we’re currently hiring.

US headquarters in Cambridge, Boston

CLC bio
10 Rogers St # 101
Cambridge, MA 02142
USA

New US office in the Washington DC area

Our other office is a completely new Government Sector Branch office in Germantown, Maryland.

CLC bio
Germantown Innovation Center, Suite 2025
20271 Goldenrod Lane
Germantown, MD 20876
USA

Back in July at ISMB we handed out t-shirts that had a picture of a nice looking cake piece and this text:

It’s a piece of cake! Just like your bioinformatics should be. Try a piece of delicious cakeformatics from the cake loving company, CLC bio

The overall idea is: Who doesn’t like cake in some form or another? Almost no one. So basically ‘cake’ makes you think of something nice. And that’s the same thing our users are saying about our software: Instead of bioinformatics having to be a headache with Linux computers and mile-long command-line scripts, it’s instead multiple powerful analyses through an intuitive graphical user interface. It’s nice.

In essence: Cakeformatics is basically just bioinformatics the delicious way. Just like we like it. Enjoy!

Scientist, Jeremy Lambert, from RainDance elaborates on how their microdroplet technology, high-throughput sequencing, and CLC bio’s bioinformatics tools can be used in resequencing projects to effectively speed up the process of analyzing complex diseases. In this video examplified by a publication on X-Linked mental retardation from the Max-Planck Institute.