CCBI: The Cambridge Computational Biology Institute

Daniel Sheehan - MPhil in Computational Biology 2004-5

Daniel (right) with Quin Wills

First degrees: BSc Hons Genetics (University of Cardiff, 1999)

MSc Computer Science (University of Bath, 2000)

Since completing my degree I've been working full-time on a Computational Biology start-up company, SimuGen, that I co-founded with another member of my class whilst on the course. In essence we're applying some of the techniques we learnt about in the Functional Genomics module and combining these with classic molecular biology to develop a system for assessing the toxicity of compounds using in-vitro methods.

Its incredibly exciting work and interesting from both a business and science perspective, from day to day I'll be looking at biochemistry to understand pathways elicited by toxicants, to assessing genes for their potential as biomarkers, to developing our machine learning algorithms which make the assessment on toxicity. Therefore in terms of science its incredibly board with elements from genetics, genomics, biochemistry, molecular biology, chemistry, statistics, mathematics and software engineering. These activities are balanced with the business side of the work which I'm responsible for, these include project management, financial management, fund raising and day to day business coordination.

Dr Quin Wills and I started the concept late 2004 and entered it into the Cambridge University run entrepreneurs competition. This was amazing useful, giving us a wealth of information on successfully starting a business, providing us with expert advice and most importantly contacts in the Cambridge business cluster, including a mentor who has now gone on to become the Chairman of our company.

At present we are based in the Cambridge Science Park and are in the very final stages of attaining our first round of funding. We'll be using this to build a proof of concept product which we can demonstrate to our investors and potential customers.