In this week's edition of Rochester's Best Kept Secrets, WHAM's Randy Gorbman talks about a local high tech company that helps other companies battle disease....
The company is VirtualScopics, which has developed technology that helps pharmaceutical and other medical companies develop information on how well certain drugs or medical devices are working.
CEO Jeff Markin says the business began in 2000, as a spinoff from research being done at the U of R Medical Center. He says it started with a collaboration between radiologists and computer software engineers. VirtualScopics is able to take MRI's or other images, and extract information...
"We've developed software tools and techniques that we use to analyze those images"
Markin says their customers include pharmaceutical companies, who would contract with VirtualScopics to help develop drugs used to fight a specific disease, such as cancer...
"So they would work with an organization like ours, in those disease areas, that lend themselves to using medical imaging to characterize what's going on inside the body, to help them with that development."
Markin says VirtualScopics has seen its business continue to grow...
"We've got around 100 active projects underway, and a backlog of over 40 million dollars, so these are multi-year projects, multi-year studies for new drugs that we've been contracted to work on"
Markin says this area has just the kind of workforce a company like VirtualScopics likes to draw from...
"We have brought on some really talented people. The Rochester area has highly educated workforce, imaging is something that Rochester is noted for."
Markin says VirtualScopics now has about 76 employees, and they continue to add staff.
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