LabMeeting: Online Scientific Collaboration

Scientific treatment for deadly diseases and life threatening ailments never seem to come quickly enough. The founders of LabMeeting Mark Kaganovich, Daniel Kaganovich, Jeremy England, and Joseph Perla, hope to harness the power of the internet to perhaps change the way scientific researchers interact and develop cures.

Labmeeting is an online platform designed to unite scientists in the life sciences (biology), and allow those researchers to more efficiently search for, organize, and share scientific documents, papers, protocols, and ideas relevant to their research.

Labmeeting centers around the concept of organizing one's paper collection. As a researcher you can upload for free all of the journal publication PDFs that you are reading, have read, or will read, and Labmeeting parses them and matches them with their bibliographic records. This creates a kind of “inbox” for your papers. You can search the full text of the files, share your collection with colleagues, and view the paper in an embedded viewer right in the browser. This makes scientific information sharing more seamless and paperless. Right now, inefficient methods to transfer scientific knowledge is just one of the problems slowing the scientific community.

Scientists create profiles, organize their papers in their private collection, and share papers with their colleagues and lab members. Because of the usefulness of this tool thousands of researchers in bio-related fields have created a community on Labmeeting.

Unlike the business world, the scientific world tends to move slowly. Career scientists will often attribute this to the following five factors:

1. Studying living things takes too long for quick results

2. Receiving money through federal grants is slow and uncertain.

3. Obtaining critical equipment can be a problem because of the high cost.

4. Finding talented personnel with experience can be a challenge.

5. Short cuts in research are rare, and research protocols can be frustrating and difficult to find.

While entrepreneurs may never be able to expedite research on lab animals (because these experiments must comply with strict protocols) or change the speed at which the NIH (National Institute of Health) awards money to scientists, Labmeeting may be able to encourage more collaboration and information sharing among scientists. Researchers could share their equipment when appropriate, and find talented personnel, relevant research articles, and protocols quickly and efficiently.

Labmeeting offers a free and online search service (no software to download and install) that is an improvement over similar services currently being offered to scientists like PubMed, EndNote, and RefWorks. PubMed is a government run index of life sciences papers. EndNote and RefWorks are citation management software programs that researchers buy to help them manage bibliographies in their publications. Labmeeting provides an improved system for searching the literature and compiling references, and it helps colleagues organize and exchange information better than ever before.

If Labmeeting can incentivize scientists to use their platform, they stand to create a sustainable and potentially industry-altering company. The company may be able to create incentive for scientists to actively engage in Labmeeting by developing a ranking system for scientific papers based on how scientists regard articles within the network. With a team of extremely bright recent college graduates and already $500,000 in seed financing from Peter Thiel, Kinsey Hills, and other angel investors, Labmeeting may have the tools necessary to make a difference in science with the potential to benefit mankind.

The LabMeeting Team (Founders):

Mark Kaganovich:

Harvard, Biochemistry and Computer Science

Labmeeting Profile

Daniel Kaganovich:

Harvard Biochemistry, Stanford PhD in Cell Biology

He just published a paper in Nature that describes his work.

Labmeeting Profile

Jeremy England:

Harvard Biochemistry, Stanford PhD in Biophysics

Jeremy was a Rhodes Scholar and is currently completing his PhD at Stanford University in biophysics. He does work on computational modeling of how proteins fold.

Labmeeting Profile

Joseph Perla

Princeton, Computer Science

Labmeeting Profile