Name of the Organization: Netrias, LLC
Industry: Artificial Intelligence in the life sciences
CEO/Founder: Mark Weston
1) How has MTIP impacted your company or ability to hire interns?
MTIP supported a 2024 summer internship for UMBC graduate student, Ashely Copenhaver. Ashley made significant contributions to our work on the DARPA program Smart Non-invasive Assays of Physiology (SNAP) (https://www.darpa.mil/program/smart-non-invasive-assays-of-physiology). Netrias hopes to hire Ashely full time this fall due to her outstanding performance, intelligence and fit with the company’s culture.
2) What inspired the founder to start the company?
To speed medical breakthroughs by applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to life sciences research and development.
3) What problem is the company solving, or what service or feature is the company providing?
Medical research is time consuming, and dependent on a lot of manual processes that generate data that is often unsuited for analysis by state of the art Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning models. Our proven automated technology gets life sciences data AI ready lightning fast with minimal human curation to advance the scientific discovery process.
4) Can you share a major milestone or success that has had a significant impact on your company’s growth?
In December 2023, three prominent R&D agencies invested in Netrias’s AI-driven data harmonization technology to transition its use to increase pathogenicity prediction accuracy of unknown threats. (Read more) The investment signaled a first for Netrias, and has propelled the company’s significant growth in 2024.
5) What is your company aiming to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years?
We have to enable researchers in academic, government and commercial life sciences organizations to accelerate medical breakthroughs by using AI.
6) What advice would you give to someone wanting to start a company in your industry?
The life sciences domain is slow to change, so patience and focus are paramount. However, the payoffs for our society are gigantic, and the satisfaction of helping researchers try to find cures for many deadly diseases attracts the best talent.