Here are four early-stage biomed-related online startups that have been in the news recently:
MedPedia — This is exactly what it sounds like, Wikipedia for medical information. They’ve enlisted top medical schools from the US, Canada, and the UK to seed the initial content, and will open the site up to MDs and PhDs to keep the content up-to-date. I expect we’re going to see a lot more biomed-related wikis like MedPedia. Distributing research through static PDFs as we do today is just a horribly inefficient way to communicate data and an impossible way to convey dynamic information. Wikis will centralize all the knowledge related to a particular topic and are inherently multimedia. Peer-review will be hashed out in the open in the associated discussion for each entry. So, I’m curious to see how things work out with this company. The company is in closed beta right now, and I don’t have any funding information.
IMedExchange — It’s basically a closed chat room for practicing physicians — “a virtual place to learn and relax with trusted colleagues.” This sounds so 1995. They raised $2.5 million from 40 angels, all but two of whom were MDs. Well, we all know what notoriously bad investors MDs are.
CollabRx — Featured in the WSJ on Tuesday [subscription required], this company offers a new take on patient-supported research. It sounds like they “project manage” drug development. I’m curious to see how this will work out given all the press last month about Bill Gate’s disappointment with his results from applying the project management principles of software engineering to drug development. The company has been funded with $2 million from the founder, Jay Tenenbaum, and is currently raising $3 million from friends and family.
Labmeeting — This social networking site for biomedical research scientists raised a $500k seed round in May. The primary focus seems to be facilitating the sharing of PDFs of journal articles. Eh. You already know how I feel about PDFs. Worse, this startup will be clobbered as soon as the Papers guys implement article sharing over Bonjour.
