We continue our acquaintance with the Skolkovo Technopark


    Ural is the first of the Skolkovo Technopark buildings.

    My last visit to Skolkovo caused some response on the hub, including the administration of the technopark, due to the fact that the review turned out to be rather one-sided and amateurish. Yes, this is my IMHO, but the problem is that this is generally the only blogging article about the  Technopark on the hub, and in all RuNet.


    Directly opposite the Urals - the space building of the Skolkovo business school.

    It is necessary to correct the situation - but how to tell about the technopark objectively? Probably only through the history of its residents. When I walked around the technology park, I met two projects - a platform for communicating with genetic counselors. PrimerLife and navigation system inside buildings Indoorgo . YetTsarS requested a review of Skolkovo catering - we will do it next time as soon as I go around all the establishments.


    Workplace CEO.

    I stumbled on Primerlife by chance - I went to look for residents in the Urals and started from the top floor - the left wing was empty, and only in one room there was a laugh in the mix with a discussion of some news on gene therapy. So I met with Sergey Musenko.

    A year ago, he worked with Anna Trunina at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology's Innovation and High Technology Center on a project to develop “biodegradable biliary stents for bile ducts” - these are patches for damaged vessels, which themselves decompose when the injury heals.


    Startup Guide And in total they have eleven people in a team.

    But he dreamed at that time about studying in Singularity University  is its own University of Silicon Valley with all the consequences - all the founders from Nasa to Google constantly give their lectures there, plus you immediately get into a party and get inspired by an inventive spirit. One drawback is that studying in it costs from $ 25,000.

    But not even a month had passed before Sergey suddenly received an invitation to the contest “My Idea for Russia” from the Skolkovo Open University. According to the terms of the competition, it was necessary to write a detailed resume with your leadership experience, study and offer a project on how to change the lives of five million people in five years. All for a thousand characters.



    Anya proposed stents, and Sergey proposed a genome-based social network. Both won and following a skype interview with professors from the University of Singularity, both were enrolled in the course. Biotechnology is the only branch of knowledge for which the United States does not spare money, and even in times of crisis, funding was cut for everyone except biotech.

    As a result, Anya and Sergey not only won the training, but also received a grant from Skolkovo for 3 million rubles. Having become residents of PrimerLife Technopark, they received an office, management assistance, patent support, international advertising, and most importantly, a chance to do everything as they want.

    In 2003, the project for decoding the human genome was completed. You've probably heard about him, but its significance has turned out to be a mystery. In the public opinion, the opinion was fixed that it was “decrypted” loudly - scientists simply received the ACTG code and will now figure out for decades what and what parts of the code do. But think about it - for the first time we got the source of a person as a computer program.


    James Watson, along with Francis Crick, who understood the purpose of the DNA molecule, once said: knowledge of the human genome will change the world in the same way as a typewriter. We can verify the accuracy of this forecast in our lifetime.

    Genetics as a science began with a study of the heredity of peas and Mendel’s experiments, and only after 200 years did we get to the source of the life we ​​are studying. Man is encoded by three billion pairs of nucleotites. They define everything and the physical structure and even behavior and way of thinking. But this is not much more than the volume of the windows xp source code, which has 40,000,000 lines of code.

    At the same time, the DNA code is extremely interesting in itself, it is entangled hundreds of times worse than the blackest “Hindu code” - some elements start other parts of the code when compiling, they block the third parts, and the third ones allow the first to appear when blocked. Also, in an unknown manner, separate programs are involved in the process - “junk DNA”, “supporting proteins”, pseudo DNAs, etc.

    If in 2003 the price of DNA decryption exceeded the height of everest, then by 2012 the equipment for gene experiments fell in price to the level of household appliances. At one time, more than a trillion dollars were spent on the human genome project, now $ 300 is enough for the simplest genetic analysis. In Moscow, an analysis for one disease out of the hundreds of the most common is now worth the same amount.

    Moreover, dozens of large-scale studies of genotypes have already been carried out - scientists collected samples from hundreds of thousands of people around the world to identify commonalities. Studies have yielded so much accurate results that it turned out that we have a laborious but simple way to determine all a person’s predispositions with almost complete accuracy.



    Printout of the human genome code, page 32813 (fragment)

    By spitting in a test tube, you will find out what health risks may await you. If you give this data to a geneticist, he will be able to provide you with accurate recommendations on how to avoid health problems. This is not so relevant for the Russian mentality, but in the West it is customary to invest in one's own health first of all, the fitness culture in the USA is accompanied by trips to plastic surgeons. And the first thing that starting businessmen spend money on is inserting straight teeth.

    The market for genetic services is now growing at 16% per year and is already $ 4 billion. The situation is about the same as with electrical engineering at the beginning of the last century, and in genetics, it was not without its Nikola Tesla.


    "Matrix" does not resemble?

    Craig Venter is an eccentric millionaire and an outstanding geneticist, who, however, enjoys the reputation of an adventurer. True, he was able to compete with the official project of decoding the human genome and was the first to offer everyone a decryption service for money. His fix idea is to patent all genetic technologies.

    The human genome could not be patented, and under pressure, he had to transfer his data to the state project. However, in 2000, Venter presented President Clinton with the first map of the human genome.

    Now he is trying to patent more accessible things - for example, in 2010 he synthesized a completely artificial biosentitic organism capable of reproduction. The first artificial organism in history was named Cynthia.


    The first artificial life form turned out to be blue.

    Craig’s name is worth remembering, because in the end it turned out that it was his genome that was one of 21 DNA samples, of which 5 were taken to decrypt the human genome. Since Venter himself selected and directed everything, I’m not afraid to assume that it was he who became the “human reference genome” for science no worse than the Parisian standards of meter and kilogram.

    But all this was a decade ago - now the equipment for genetic research and engineering has become available for the mass market and even the Chinese are showing their achievements.

    In 1995, scientists from Massachusetts forced a mouse to grow a human ear on its back. Unfortunately, the public did not appreciate the achievement and the mouse became a key argument on the posters of genetic engineering fighters.


    Welcome to a wonderful new world.

    In 1999, the loudest genetic sensation was silk sheep. In the Canadian NEXIA BIOTECHNOLOGIES transplanted the corresponding spider gene to ... sheep and they began to produce silk in their milk, it only remained to be separated in centrifuges.


    Professor Randy Lewis talks with his creation for the BBC report.

    In 2009, scientists at Seoul State University decided to transplant the fluorescent jellyfish gene to puppies and they really began to glow red in the dark.


    This is definitely not lost.

    On November 2, 2012, a historic event happened - the first genetic drug appeared on the European market - Gleiber is an artificially created virus that infects muscle cells with a working copy of a damaged gene that causes "genetically caused pancreatitis." Every millionth inhabitant of the planet is sick of them.

    But for us, the most important was something else. In 2006, Sergey Brin's wife founded her startup 23andme (named after the number of chromosomes) - the first service to receive DNA samples in the mail and establish a predisposition to diseases. Already after two years of work, Time magazine called this project "invention of the year."


    Sergey Brin and his wife Anna Wojitski at a party in honor of the Time Award.

    In theory, our PrimerLife of course dates back to 23andme, but takes into account all its shortcomings. Firstly, global research databases are used, not just American ones, as 23andme does - for example, Europeans will always be given a predisposition to obesity, since in the United States even a slight excess of weight is considered obesity.

    Secondly, the list of diseases is much wider and constantly updated - the authors of the project constantly monitor publications on genetics and, in the event of a new study, immediately add it to the system and analyze it for all users. Thus, users are constantly receiving new data and updates on their genome.

    Thirdly, PrimerLife immediately connects users with doctors. This may not seem important, but here lies the main problem of genetic analysis - there are very few genetic specialists to work with it. In Russia there are only 160 (!) Genetic doctors and they need to make an appointment, wait a long time in line and wait even longer for an answer. The site brings this process to automatism - it’s certainly better to go to the doctor personally, but in general, nothing prevents getting ready-made recommendations from him directly on the site.

    And in the fourth - everything is outsourced; PrimerLife does not keep its laboratories, scientists and doctors - the project only brings customers together with all the necessary specialists. The truth here is one problem - Russian legislation strictly limits both the use of genetic technologies and the transfer of biomaterials. As a result, everything is possible with us, but too expensive - an analysis instead of $ 299 in the USA will cost $ 1000 in Moscow. In the future, PrimerLife plans to solve this problem simply by building its own laboratory, maybe right in the technopark skolkovo.

    Now the project is undergoing a beta test and will be released early next year, you can be the first of its participants by leaving your contacts on the site now. When the project works, I’ll gladly spit them in a jar and write a post about the results.



    The second project I met was Indoorgo  - the Yekaterinburg team developing an application for smartphones providing indoor navigation, which is very different from the external navigation to which many are accustomed. The guys came from Yekaterinburg to submit reports on the next tranche, but not enough paper - the head of the it cluster personally tested the prototype.


    Does the prototype display a black dot on the map? Get the next tranche.

    I didn’t think about such a problem at all, but there really are great prospects behind it - the branded application of the shopping center will allow us to skillfully direct visitors to the places they need. In the parking lot - to find your car, and in the museum or store - exhibits or boutiques, as well as display their description on the screen. After all, it is the lack of indoor navigation that breaks all the developers' dreams of real augmented reality like google glass or nokia city lens .

    Remember how car navigators have changed the world. Indoor navigation can lead to more significant changes. In the end, urban dwellers spend 87-90% of their time indoors.


    Tormenting the questions of unapproachable developers

    Navigation is carried out on Wi-Fi points (in the case of Indorgow, only one is enough) using their own algorithm, which programmers can only say that it is more efficient and more accurate than its analogues, including Google maps and the alliance that Nokia joined. These companies have been developing since 2004, but additional equipment and devices are needed for their applications. In contrast to this data, it is worth noting that in “Indorgou NS” in just 9 months they wrote an algorithm and created an almost exactly working prototype that does not need additional equipment, just a Wi-Fi access point. With such speed, they are quite capable of overtaking Google and other competitors, who spent years on development and received much worse results. Out of perseverance, Indoorgo even rewrote the Android Wi-Fi driver, in order to achieve maximum positioning accuracy. But it turned out that the increase in accuracy is so small that the game is not worth the candle.

    It should be noted that the system really works very accurately - I saw it in action in the Skolkovo office on the  25th floor of the WTC and in the Tretyakov Gallery - everywhere the phone instantly and accurately indicated its position, it was buggy only in close parallel corridors - the point on the screen sometimes jumped from one corridor to another, and nevertheless, the developers achieved incredible results in such a short period, the average accuracy was 2.47 m, for the entire time of testing it ranged from 0 (i.e. absolute accuracy) - up to 3.6 m .


    Director of the IT cluster with Albert Efimov personally testing a prototype.

    The developers are so proud of their system that they are ready to arrange a challenge for the habr - those who can guess the closest to the truth how their system works - they are ready to take on a job with a salary "allowing you not to look back at job offers from Western it-corporations" . While their office is in Yekaterinburg, but if there are five people from Moscow, they are ready to open a representative office in the capital. Now they need testers, software engineers for Android of the first category and one senior software engineer of the first category.

    If we talk about the role of the technopark, then it is the key in the project - if it were not for the management of the technopark, constantly urging the team on, the developers in themselves would inspire our strength to launch the project. Moreover, the Technopark only helps with external management - paperwork, deadlines, etc. the project decides everything else itself - for example, from the two million of the last tranche, one and a half the team decided to spend on salaries. The total amount of the grant received was the maximum for Skolkovo - one million dollars.

    The only negative is that Indoorgo is not yet a resident of the technopark; therefore, it cannot use its equipment. Which by the way is pretty sad for the guys - a radio laboratory would be very useful for them, but instead of the available Skolkovo one, they have to get out by themselves. The reason for this injustice is commonplace - it is unprofitable to transport families to Moscow, but there is no housing in the technology park (yet?). So you have to work for yourself in Yekaterinburg, maybe having recruited staff in Moscow they can open their office in the technology park - it all depends on you, dear readers.


    Atomsphere of innovation, as I saw it.

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