Interview: Jeff Boily, BIOWIZARD – Part 1

One of the features I’ve wanted to add to the MessagingLab blog is interviews with entrepreneurs in the life sciences and biotechnology industries, and individuals doing great things in marketing and branding that could be applied to the life sciences and biotech. The first interview in this series is with Jeff Boily of BioWizard.

BioWizard’s motto is “Research Made Simple.” BioWizard gives life sciences researchers tools and functionalities designed to increase the accesibility and dissemination of information. In the biomedical research community, there is an unmet need for tools like BioWizard’s because information is growing exponentially and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay up to date on information within even your own field.

Jeff and I spoke earlier this year. What follows is Part 1 of our interview. I’ll publish Part 2 early next week.

JEFF BOILY:   I’ve been a biotech-pharmaceutical executive for over 30 years and started my career as a sales representative .  I came up through the commercial ranks, doing sales, marketing and licensing both at Fortune 500 pharma like Abbott and Wyeth, then working for a public biotech in the UK.  Subsequently, I’ve been involved with four life sciences startups.

For over 12 years, I’ve been a CEO, leading the transformational change of organizations and taking them to the next level or getting them ready for raise financial capital with VCs/Private Equity or IPOs. I’ve also come into early stage startups where you’re starting from ground zero, establish funding and business objectives. Prior to BioWizard, I was President and Chief Executive Officer of Rogers Medical Intelligence Solutions, a clinical intelligence and consulting firm that provides innovative services to the top 50 biotech and  pharmaceutical companies, largely in R&D , M&A, and marketing. After five years, we sold Medical Intelligence Solutions to a New York private equity firm.

In September 2006 MentorTech Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on companies originating at the University of Pennsylvania, were evaluating Biowizard as a potential investment. I was asked me to meet with the founders and discuss the market. One quickly realized this was an outstanding group of scientists and entrepreneurs who were studying at the University of Pennsylvania perusing their Ph.D. and/or M.D. degrees.

They created BioWizard, largely out of frustration in doing their academic research in the life sciences.They found that they had to scour the web for sources of research information.  That was especially true with getting literature out of PubMed as well as product information. They wanted to create a service that would incorporate Web 2.0 innovations in the science literature field.

They started BioWizard in August 2005 to solve these research issues, and wanted to see what else they could do with the platform.

Long story short, I came on board as the Chief Executive Officer helped redo several business elements, secured initial venture capital financing, then began to market our services to life scientists around the world.  To this day, some 85 percent of our users are either Ph.D.s or M.D.s in various academic, research institutions and pharmaceutical biotech companies around the world.

SCHMIEDER:   Could you tell us what is it that is appealing about the site?  What makes scientists and researchers come back to BioWizard?
BOILY:  From a content perspective, BioWizard makes it possible for a user to monitor our site and use our proprietary search engine to search PubMed a service from the National Library of Medicine, search several peer-reviewed journals in the life sciences arena, then, if you find an article that you believe is relevant to the Biowizard community, or an article you wrote, you could post it on our site for other users to vote on. It’s very similar to the social bookmarkting site www.digg.com in that it creates a community by tagging content, but it’s aimed at a very specific audience.

For example, let’s say you found an article in one of 18 scientific and clinical categories on the clinical side of the subjects BioWizard tracks, you would post it. If they liked it and thought it contributed to overall knowledge, they could vote on it or could start discussions around the article. In fact, posing questions to our scientific and medical community regarding articles and their applicability to other areas occurs regularly.

This ability to post an article and to have people vote on it is very appealing and has been an innovative idea for sharing content in the life sciences community.

And BioWizard makes it easy to join the community. All it takes is a very simple registration process.  We do not require names, if you want to remain anonymous.  We found anonymity has been very important to our users as many users prefer to keep their academic or professional affiliations anonymous. We’ve learned that asking for too much information actually impedes the sharing of knowledge.

SCHMIEDER:   How does the model that you described fit into kind of the bigger universe where peer-reviewed articles are moving onto the Internet. Does BioWizard fit into that debate? Or, is it something that’s grown from that?
BOILY:  Not really. To post an article on our site, it must already be in one of the approved peer-reviewed scientific or medical journals within the PubMed database. The gatekeeper is PubMed.  The articles on BioWizard come from those thousands of journals.  The editorial review process established by each of those journals is what dictates the BioWizard content and all of these are all peer-reviewed journals.  Someone can’t decide to write an article for a “non PubMed approved journal” and post it to BioWizard. It doesn’t work that way. In addition, Biowizard is also a LinkOut provider of PubMed.

SCHMIEDER:   What is the ratio of people who come to the site to search PubMed compared to those that actually come to the site and post articles so that people can vote on them or interact with the articles?  Are they one in the same?
BOILY: As with all things, this approaches the traditional 80/20 rule.  I would say that a very small percentage of the people who come in actually post articles and open dialogue.  A lot of people post their own articles or research that they’ve been associated with, then users vote.  Voting is very simple you simply click on the Vote button.

However, the vast majority of scientists come to the site to search for articles and look at what new articles have been posted in their specific scientific or clinical research area.  So the exact ratio would vary but it’s definitely a smaller portion who actually post and open up comments.The audience is a global, so we get a great perspective from the people coming into our site.

SCHMIEDER:   Let me ask the million dollar question: How does BioWizard currently make money?
BOILY:  We sell advertising and promotional programs to life science and technology firms that have a very specific focus on the life sciences vertical.

SCHMIEDER:   How do people find BioWizard?
BOILY:  We have done quite a bit of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing to drive traffic.  The URL for PubMed is quite specific, so we have leveraged the technology so that we show up in organic searches. That way any users looking for PubMed, will also see the BioWizard link. Users can do their PubMed search without having to go to PubMed.  However, BioWizard adds a lot of information and value that is not available on PubMed.

We also use a keyword advertising program and have done a variety of other marketing programs to help drive users to our site.

SCHMIEDER:   Which of those have you found to be more successful for you?
BOILY:   Search engine optimization. SEO has been very productive and key in significantly growing our organic rankings in search.  We have found SEO to be very lucrative for us.

SCHMIEDER: I searched for PubMed on Google and BioWizard comes up as the first result on the second page.  That’s pretty great considering the top four results on the first page are PubMed itself.
BOILY: Right, that’s because PubMed is a major governmental entity. If you actually look at the number of results , it’s over 30 million.  So we’re now on the top of Page 2. That means we’ve slipped a bit.  We used to be at the bottom of the first page. And that was due largely to SEO.

SCHMIEDER: That’s very impressive.
BOILY:   Not too bad for a small startup firm.

SCHMIEDER: I’m curious in terms of the direction that you guys are taking.  Where are you going with BioWizard? What are your plans?
BOILY: We’ve decided that to grow and leverage the full value of BioWizard, we would like to form strategic partnerships.  Funding in this particular environment is challenging, as we all know. Exit strategies are non-existent and M&A has slowed down dramatically.  So, we are looking to align ourselves with a much larger organization where we can leverage our search engine, our information, and expertise in the life sciences arena. The partner would ideally be a company that is seeking to offer other services to scientists or researchers and BioWizard could help them retain their customer base.

We understand the biotech and pharmaceutical industries and we understand academic research, the organization is made up of Ph.D.s and M.D.s.  Our senior staff include a Medical Officer, Scientific Officer, Chief Technology Officer and President all coming from the University of Pennsylvania.

SCHMIEDER: You and I had talked about this previously, you mentioned some of the firms that and types of companies that would make sense for partners.
BOILY: Yes, it’s going to be people who want to reach life scientists.  We know some of the prominent computer companies and software companies have very specific programs directed at life scientists. They might find a partnership with BioWizard an important way to reach this audience.

SCHMIEDER: Without mentioning names, could one of the larger computer hardware companies or a big database provider being interested?
BOILY:  Yes, they are all making significant investments into the life sciences because there is a renewed interest in computation for the life sciences. In addition, all the pure–play life sciences firms that sell life sciences services and products into the research institutions would make great partners.

TO BE CONTINUED.