Biognosys

Biognosys is a proteomics company located in Zurich and founded in 2008 by Dr. Oliver Rinner, Dr. Johan Malström, Dr. Philipp Antoni and Prof. Ruedi Aebersold, so it looks like it was spun out ETH.

Biognosys is looking to make it in the field of personalized medicine, something which is of great interest to pharmaceutical companies. The idea being (in the post-blockbuster world) you find a drug that works best on only a subset of the population. If you test this drug in clinical trials with all possible patients, it may not show significant results, but if you have a subset of responders, you could then market your drug to that smaller subset. So, no big blockbuster, but instead of a rejection you get a drug on the market. Of course, key to this is to identify which population responds to the drug. 

Biognosys performs mass spec analysis on protein samples, including identification of modified peptides (for example you could identify protein phosphorylation) and they have complex evaluation software for the interpretation of the massive amount of data generated. To extend the technology past screening for personalized medicine, Biognosys wants to offer a 'protein passport', a yearly screening of your entire blood protein content. This seems like a decent business plan, yearly screening! However, as recently seen in the PSA screening debate, and the older breast-screening debate, over-screening can be a serious problem. Are changes you observe in your blood a natural result of ageing or change in diet or countless other reasons. Good validated markers are hard to find (and quite valuable). However, I think the method could provide interesting data for the characterization of population norms (kind of like the 1000 genome project). Maybe with enough characterization good markers can come out of the research.