Gregory Penner and Ximena Vedoya both come from a background working with crop genetics. They moved into healthcare with the creation of a fee-for-service aptamer company in Canada NeoVentures Biotechnology Inc. which has grown to become a world leader in aptamer development and aptamer applications. Their experience with deep data from plants has always provided them with a different vision of what is possible in healthcare.

Discoveries in diagnostics and drug development are more effectively achieved through agnostic, non-hypothesis driven creation of knowledge. This perspective has led them to develop the Aptamarker platform over the last ten years with the formation of a second company in Paris, NeoVentures Biotechnology Europe. The vision has always been to develop a high-throughput proteomics platform that saw proteins as they exist in vivo. The development of the platform evolved through many different insights and discoveries, FRELEX selection of aptamers for free targets, reproducible aptamer libraries, and data analysis on the aptamer structure level. All of these innovations were driven by the vision of building a platform that could see proteins as they are, as opposed to the compilation of probes trained on defined recombinant proteins into a panel. The key was to be able to discover changes to proteins that were not known.

The rapid evolution of improvements in machine learning and AI, and the existence of in silico knowledge bases on protein structures has enabled them to expand their vision. Their vision now has become to build a proteomics platform that has the capacity to interface between in silico prediction knowledge and biological reality. Biological reality meaning both the actual composition of patient’s blood and how this relates to clinicians observations of medical states. A full understanding of all medical conditions, all comorbidities based on personalized proteome analysis. 

The Aptamarker platform enables us to imagine full proteome characterization on a personalized level. This is the future.