“What goes around comes around” or “as you sow, so shall you reap” is the basic understanding of how karma – the law of cause and effect – works. Everything we say and do, determines what’s going to happen to us in the future. A firm believer in Karma and a work-passionista is Julie Bryant, CEO of Rancho BioSciences. She saw her next opportunity to build a world class, solution oriented lifescience service company to help leverage the explosion of data by utilizing experts in their field with a flexible business model on an as needed basis.
Julie believes that she has been extremely fortunate to meet some amazing mentors along her way to entrepreneurship. In the arts, it is an accepted fact that a young person learns the trade best when studying under someone’s guidance. In business, too, the importance of the mentor relationship for a person’s development has been anticipated. Attributing her success to her father and key people she has worked for in her career, Julie asserts, “My dad taught me that you can do whatever you want and can be whoever you want to be and treat everyone equally. I am passionate about science and helping find cures. This motivates and empowers me every day”
Julie’s Entrepreneurial Expedition
Julie has an extensive experience of over 25 years in Life Sciences starting with Nature, Journal of Science in London. In San Diego, she worked for a molecular modeling company called Biosym. Julie was one of the pioneers in molecular modeling growing the Asian and Latin American marketplace and finally coming back to the head office in San Diego.
Julie then moved to high throughput microarray technology (expression and genotyping) with Genometrix building a blood bank of diseases in The Woodlands, Texas. Analysis of this kind of data was the next step, and Julie helped spin out OminiViz, where they used text mining algorithms to analyze categorical, numerical and text data. She then established the Bryant Consulting Group that worked with several companies: Kinematik for ebooks, ChemDiv for building blocks and chemistry services and GeneGo for manually curated pathways. Julie, in the role of the Vice President at GeneGo, built a group of international sales people, customer support, application scientists and IT as GeneGo’s products MetaCore and MetaBase became an industry standard staple. GeneGo was later acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2010.
Rancho BioSciences, the Data Curation Company, was founded at the end of 2012 by Julie as a fee for Service Company to support life science in industry, hospitals, CRO’s, foundations, Government, and academia.
“Rancho Biosciences” ─ the Scientific Data Curation Company
With the rapid growth in research activities and the resulting body of scientific data, it has become as important a strategic resource as natural resources and human resources. Scientific research depends more and more on finding theories and knowledge from scientific data, and thus data-intensive scientific discovery has become an important paradigm of scientific research.
Therefore, it is urgent to develop and adopt methods to support the collection, collation, preservation and utilization of scientific data, which are referred to as scientific data curation. Rancho BioSciences is a Data Curation Company that cleans, organizes and harmonizes all kinds of life science data leveraging vocabularies and ontologies. As a result of this, the company also provides analysis services with a team of bioinformaticians and diligent developers who create workflows, build new databases and interfaces whenever needed.
Clients approach Rancho with their tougher problems as it provides a one-stop-solution. Each member at Rancho has at least a PhD and the team is creative and innovative working always on time and within budget.
Julie’s Belief in her Creative Thinkers
Rancho BioSciences prides itself on having only ‘A’ Team Players. Julie’s assiduous efforts in hiring creative thinkers, which is assessed by their underlying passion for what they do, has paid off in the form of Rancho’s success. Julie says, “This is number one in our culture code…be passionate about what you do and we love to curate and analyze data that could help make a diagnostic or stratify patients to ensure success of drugs.”
Every day Julie and her team have the honor of being able to help people have their drugs approved or fast tracked by the FDA. This in turn helps a diagnostic company have their panel validated or help foundations like Michael J Fox Foundation and CHDI get their experimental data in the public domain so more people can help find cures for their disease area.
“This takes a lot of work, we follow our culture code religiously to make sure everyone fits our culture, we run personality tests and we test all people coming in as well having multiple team members interviewing them. It also helps if someone I trust recommends them. We also have a few of our former clients working for Rancho now which is rather nice,” affirms Julie.
Future Aspects
Julie envisions an exponential growth for Rancho BioSciences. The company is already running ahead of its annual revenue target with 3 more months to go and each year it strives to thrive with higher growth. This is a result of the word-of-mouth from their valued current clients, who have been in business with Rancho for years. Julie and the team at Rancho are grateful towards all the kind words they receive which motivate them to be the best they can be.
“I am encouraged by how much messy data is out there and it keeps coming in higher volumes so I think we will be busy for the rest of our lives,” mentions Julie.
Julie is sure that Rancho will continue to grow and be involved in projects that will make a difference for human betterment. She is quite excited about the future of health and wellness and microbiome in the industry.