Portfolio

Verso Biosciences

The Verso MarkerLab software platform organizes and presents life science data in an intuitive, engaging, and enlightening format. A unique partnership with Dayspring brought it to life.

MVP for a Life Science Software Startup

The Partnership

Verso is what happens when people with a diverse set of skills really enjoy working together. Dayspring had worked with Troy Viss (information design wizard) since 1999 on efforts such as the delivery of data reports for McGraw-Hill’s state-level testing contracts. A joint engagement with Steven Watkins (metabolomics and lipidomics expert) developing new software for visualizing lipidomics led us collectively to wonder: what might it be like to continue to create beautiful software for life science together?

The answer was Verso.

The Challenge

Life science software has a reputation for being difficult to use. All too often, it’s cobbled together from the most convenient open source offerings with little attention paid to usability. Our challenge was to envision, design, and build an application that would take life science to the next level of user experience. Between Dayspring’s experience with consumer-grade software, Troy’s information design skills, and Steve’s background as a leading omics expert, our collaboration was ready for the challenge.

The Project

Service

Technologies

Angular

Apache Solr

Symfony

MySQL

R

AWS EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda

UX Partner

Knowledgesource

The MarkerLab web application platform, Verso’s first product, democratizes the visualization and analysis of omics data–taking it from a realm limited to PhD biostatisticians and placing it into the hands of researchers everywhere.

We started with a deep dive into the science–understanding the various types of measurable entities (analytes), taxonomies, biological pathways, and functions that make up meaning in omics. Together, we conceived of the idea of application overlays–groupings of biologically meaningful organizations for analytes–that allowed researchers to both benefit from other experts’ work as well as organize and contribute their own.

We envisioned–and then brought to life–an interface that would provide a consistent and extensible user experience for navigating, exploring, manipulating, and drilling down into specific data.

Automated biomarker matching allows researchers to bring external resources to bear on their uploaded data files. The precisely crafted, interactive reports allow researchers to get hands-on with their data: manipulating a barplot, drilling down into a volcano plot, or exploring a pathway map in order to understand laboratory results in their biological context. Researchers can do a deep dive on individual data points, accessing linked industry-standard reference data. And built-in snapshot and commenting tools allow researchers to “pin” items of interest to a notebook, facilitating discussion with collaborators.

We host it all in a Dayspring-managed Amazon Web Services environment using technologies that allow the data processing to seamlessly scale.

Web app view of pathway map
Web app view of volcano plot map

Let’s talk

Looking for a software development partner? Get in touch with us to start a conversation.

415.247.9421 Ext. 102