I'm Dr. John Wilson, founder and CEO of ProtiFi, where we've innovated the solutions to bring precision omics to life. Beginning with genomics, many promises have been made about the potential of omics, and they never really panned out. Major bottlenecks have prevented omics from making significant clinical impact. Data analysis has been hard and, in cases, outright wrong.
And I founded ProtiFi to generate solutions to those bottlenecks so that omics techniques can make real, tangible, and positive impacts on people's health. ProtiFi solutions span the whole spectrum, from sample collection and preparation through to process control and chromatography, and extend all the way to data analysis and the early detection of disease. Every single one of those pieces of an omics pipeline has to be controlled, has to be precise, has to be reliable, and it has to be extraordinarily reproducible, and that's exactly what we did.
We innovated the solutions to all the problems which have prevented omics from making real impact in clinical settings. Now, clinical impact, if that's your goal, means that the instruments running samples have to be operating 24/7. It means that the systems have to be super bulletproof, so much so that a person with just a high school degree can operate them.
And the current state of the art, where you have instruments that break, and you have to call service engineers, and you have to replace columns, and things clog, and uptime is not ideal, none of that is going to work in a clinical setting. And those things, things just have to work. And so what we did was to develop solutions that are extraordinarily robust. This level of robustness has never been achieved before, and it has allowed the pipelines that we've developed to be installed in research and clinical laboratories, in hospitals, in medical settings.
We've made omics analyses simply work, and that allows scientists, researchers, and medical professionals to bring precision omics to life. Now, one of the major bottlenecks has been sample preparation, which, according to published reports, is responsible for 75% of the overall variability in omics data. Now, 75% is a huge problem, and our S-Trap sample processing system reduces it to less than 10%.
That's been incredibly transformative, and it's actually a really hard problem. Proteins have very diverse solubilities, so how do you develop a system that works just as well with the proteins of the brain as it does with the proteins of blood? We did that, and it has meant that researchers all over the world are able to apply the same technique, the same workflow, the same pipeline to samples as diverse as serum and stool, and everything in between, literally all kingdoms of life.
I founded ProtiFi as a post-doc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, doing exactly the omics analyses that need to be translated into clinical settings. And for that reason, we as a company have great knowledge about where the limitations are, where the challenges are. And another huge challenge has been in data analysis. There's too many tools, people misuse statistics, sometimes intentionally, and what we get is "digital exhaust," a bunch of results that mean maybe nothing.
To fix that, we developed SimpliFi, the world's first data-to-meaning engine. And I just want to show you how quickly it extracts meaning from omics data. So these people are COVID negative, and these are COVID positive, and if we just slide the sensitivity and specificity bars to 100%, these are all of the biomarkers that perfectly distinguish COVID positive from COVID negative.
Things like pulmonary surfactant protein and tumor necrosis factor alpha-induced protein, just the sorts of things that we would expect. And if we click pathways, well, looky there, cell-surface interactions at the vascular cell wall. Fc gamma receptor-mediated phagocytosis, immunoregulatory interactions between lymphoid and nonlymphoid cells. This is just what we would expect for a viral disease. And if we click cell markers, the observed changes are most highly associated with plasma cells and B cells, again showing omics can deliver clinically relevant rapid insight.
And you can do all of this on your smartphone. So the technologies we developed solve all the bottleneck issues that have prevented omics from making clinical impact. They allow the use of a single sample-processing system, a single data analysis system, and you can use that single system on every sample and with every omics, proteomics, lymponomics, metabolomics, glycomics. This level of usability in a standardized system has never been achieved before, and now our solutions are being used literally all over the globe.
Sample storage is absolutely fundamental to biological research with the sole exception of room temperature-stable samples, and those are few and far between. Because sample storage is so essential and because if a freezer goes down, we will lose not one sample but a whole freezer full of samples, we have to be completely assured that this equipment will work, assuming we have power.
That's why we came to PHCbi. We had a freezer fail, and we were frantically packing it full of dry ice, so we wouldn't lose our samples. And yes, while we only warmed 10 degrees, now we have to record that this happened for this number of days, and we don't want that. We partnered with PHCbi for a very simple reason. We want to plug in a freezer and not worry that that equipment, which is essential to our business, is somehow going to fail.
That's what PHCbi has delivered to us, a fundamentally important capability that's simply reliable and trustable.
