HipDynamics – an early-stage digital startup run by King’s College London researchers Maximilian Kerz and Davide Danovi – has been awarded a Catalyst Grant by Digital Science, a leading global technology incubator focused on jumpstarting innovation in the research community.
The Digital Science Catalyst Grant is an international initiative to support new software tools and technologies for research. The program supports and invests in early stage ideas in the novel use of information technology in research, with a grant awarded to the most promising ideas to aid science and further education research.
Maximilian Kerz (a PhD Student in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics at King’s College London) and Davide Danovi (lead at King’s HipSci Cell Phenotyping Unit), developed HipDynamics as a way to tackle the problems around facilitating data integration in cell and molecular biology. It is an open source, go-to, data set interrogation tool which facilitates data visualisation and sharing through an intuitive dashboard and contextual analyses, offering data management capabilities between users and research groups.
According to Kerz, who works on several projects at the Centre for Translational Informatics, “In this field, it is increasingly difficult to integrate data from different sources and analyse them appropriately, not just due to their sheer size, but also due to the challenges in the interoperability between tools and formats. HipDynamics enables a progressively pervasive digitisation of laboratory data. Our vision is to enable the community to fully leverage their data and improve research outcomes. This is why we are thrilled to have received a Catalyst Grant and look forward to making HipDynamics a reality.”
Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science, commented that, “HipDynamics Pro impressed us during the Catalyst Grant process with their detailed submission and the team’s deep domain knowledge. Although at an early stage, their approach to developing the product hand-in-hand with end users gave the judging panel confidence that they will bring a truly useful product to market.”
The team will use the Catalyst Grant to develop their product to be beta-tested by scientists within the framework of the Stem Cell Hotel that is opening at King’s College London. HipDynamics joins two other companies who have also been awarded Catalyst Grants by Digital Science, which is a business division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.