Watershed Informatics’ intuitive Data Lab platform empowers our clients to design, execute, and iterate their own sequencing analyses, shortening time between iterations and enabling more efficient and effective experimentation. They expedite and multiply the development of targeted, breakthrough therapies and diagnostics. Watershed returns to RESI this January as an exhibitor. In the following interview, Watershed’s Head of Sales, Madeline Kelly, provides insight on how Watershed came to be, their technology, team, and target customer.
Caiti Dolegowski (CD): Please introduce us to Watershed. Tell us about your technology and platform.
Madeline Kelly (MK): Watershed Informatics is the first fully verticalized bio-IT platform. Our Cloud Data Lab enables life sciences organizations of any size to perform mission-critical bioinformatics analyses (such as bulk, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomics; WGS, proteomics, protein folding, AI/ML etc.) at an order of magnitude less cost and complexity than existing solutions. With purpose-built infrastructure specifically optimized for catalyzing the life sciences development pipeline, our product enables biologists to analyze their own data and bioinformaticians to rapidly prototype and deploy bespoke analytic workflows across an organization.
CD: Tell us about Watershed’s team?
MK: We are a team of expert bioinformaticians, software engineers, and biologists inspired by one mission: to enable all scientists – regardless of their programming capabilities – to leverage multi-modal data for building better drugs faster.
CD: Watershed’s Cloud Data lab can be traced to a conversation between co-founders, Jonathan Wang and Mark Kalinich. What was the conversation and how do they complement each other?
MK: Jonathan and Mark have been friends since their first day of MIT – they were actually next-door neighbors freshman year! As a software engineer, Jonathan has always been fascinated by high-performance computational infrastructure. He co-founded an algorithmic trading firm while still a student at MIT. While there, he perfected the tech stack required to democratize access to petabyte-scale ML infrastructure for software engineers and financial researchers alike. Mark is a Harvard-trained physician-scientist with nearly 15 years of translational research experience across diagnostics and therapeutics development. His mission is to improve the lives of patients by developing and deploying the enabling technologies required to bring therapeutics out of the laboratory and into the clinic. Their expertise and passions directly intersect at the problem Watershed solves: uncorking the bottleneck for biotech and pharma’s data-intensive research efforts.
CD: Who is your target customer? And what are the different offerings you provide your clients?
MK: Our target customers want to successfully and efficiently analyze their big biology data (most often -omics, but also protein folding and high content imaging) without the massive overhead currently required. (To learn more about what we mean by overhead, download our white paper). With our no-code / low-code / high-code interoperability, our platform is useful to biologists and bioinformaticians alike.
CD: Do you have a process for assessing your clients’ needs? How does that work?
MK: Watershed employs a highly consultative sales and onboarding process. We thoroughly assess the needs of our customers by learning about their workflow, analysis, and visualization needs. Our team of bioinformaticians are ready to assist our clients from day 1.
CD: Could you give us examples of current Watershed clients and how they’ve utilized your informatics?
MK: Some of our clients include SalioGen, Cellino, SynDevRx, Rejuvenate Bio, Rarebase, Revitope, and a few stealth biotech startups. Our customers’ most common request is processing next-generation sequencing data across a variety of workflows (bulk, single-cell, and spatial RNAseq; whole genome and whole exome sequencing, bulk and single-cell ATACseq, immune repertoire sequencing, CRISPR-based analyses, custom sequencing libraries, etc) and technologies (Illumina, ONT, PacBio). In addition to other data-intensive workflows (metabolomics, proteomics, high-content imaging, protein-folding) and publicly available datasets (TCGA, CCLE, GTex, UKBB), our platform has been purpose-built to overlay advanced AI/ML techniques on these data, including deep learning, generative AI, structure-based learning models, and NLP, among others.
CD: We’re thrilled to Watershed back as an exhibitor at RESI JPM San Francisco! What would you like our RESI attendees to know about Watershed
MK: We are excited to join RESI JPM San Francisco as first-time attendees! We want to meet as many of you as possible, so swing by our booth to check out our platform and enter for a chance to win 1 free month of Watershed’s Cloud Data Lab (details available at the conference). See you there!
