kwiKBio Aims to Fast Track Research with Crowdsourcing Campaign

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kwiKBio believes it’s taking too long to solve diseases and create cures. The company aims to combine advanced semantic web bioinformatics with contract research organization (CRO) business development in an e-commerce biomedical research portal. Think Wikipedia with an interactive research component coupled with Expedia for purchasing a ticket to a laboratory test.

Today, results and information are accumulating faster than researchers can follow or absorb. Scientists are wasting valuable resources repeating lab experiments previously conducted.

kwiKBio aims to help researchers, doctors, students and citizen scientists learn and find cures for diseases, much, much faster than science has moved in the past. The company has assembled a powerful knowledge base of disease and biomedical information and are now working on visualization tools for rapid learning and machine inference modules for automating hypothesis generation. kwiKBio is constructing “fast science” tools that couple the IBM Watson cognitive computer to their knowledge base to convert information into causal network and simulation models. They plan to guide users to the most valuable hypotheses and then guide testing the new ideas in contract laboratories.

Moreover, by empowering 20 million citizen scientists around the world, the number of researchers tackling disease grows by tenfold. Imagine solving cancer and other diseases during the next 10 years, instead of the next 50–80 years.

Learn more about kwiKBio from founder and Chief Science Officer Justin Lancaster in the video below:

Here at Highlight HEALTH, we think the kwiKBio portal represents an exciting next step in biomedical research. kwiKBio is running a crowdsourcing campaign at Experiment.com with the goal of raising just $2,800. The campaign ends this weekend, so if you think creating a next-generation portal for citizen scientists to help find therapies for diseases such as cancer, Alzhiemer’s and Parkinson’s sounds like a good idea, go back the project right now.

All research projects on Experiment.com must reach or surpass their funding goal before any money changes hands. You won’t be charged unless the kwiKBio meets its goal.

UPDATE 3/21/2015: For the final 30 hours of crowdfunding, kwiKBio has a donor pledging a full match of remaining donations up to $1000. That means they just need 40 more backers at $25 each. Help make the kwiKBio portal a reality.