BioInquire and NuSep settle into Athens after merger

When BioInquire was purchased in 2010, Athens became the U.S. headquarters of NuSep Inc., a publicly traded Australian company specializing in laboratory products for the study of proteins. The acquisition added ProteoIQ, the proprietary software package developed by BioInquire, to NuSep’s repertoire of 55 protein analysis products. Proteins, giant molecules that perform a broad spectrum of functions in living cells, are a major focus of biological research.

NuSEP General Manager (U.S.) and former BioInquire CEO, James Atwood III, believes that ProteoIQ will prove useful to about 5,000 academic and industrial laboratories worldwide. To date, NuSep has placed software packages in nearly 100 laboratories, and their sales representatives are working hard to reach other buyers.

ProteoIQ speeds the scientific discovery process by simplifying the analysis of large protein datasets, offering significant time-savings.

Although NuSep is a small company with six employees in the Athens area and an additional four nationwide, it’s a shining example of UGA’s efforts to support technology transfers from academia to industry. The journey to commercialization for ProteoIQ began as a purely academic collaboration between two UGA professors and ended 15 years later when the UGA Technology Commercialization Office supported the sale of BioInquire to NuSep Inc.

Ron Orlando and Rick Tarleton, both UGA professors, spearheaded an attempt to identify all proteins present in T. cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease. In doing so, they created terabytes of data that were hard to analyze. The project turned into an exercise in logistics and data handling.

To deal with the large data set, the group streamlined the available protein analysis methods and bundled them into one software package. The software proved so useful that it attracted the attention of the scientific community and spawned the idea for a saleable product.

BioInquire was formed in 2006 and the company started developing a user-friendly, menu-driven version of their software. The current package was developed using grants from the Georgia Research Alliance and the National Institutes of Health Small Business Technology Transfer.

Although their customer base is international, NuSep considers itself a local company, Atwood said, and takes pride in supporting the local economy by using local third party vendors for their business services. 

 New versions of ProteoIQ are released 3 times per year. The latest will contain new methods for measuring the amount of each different protein present in a given clinical sample. To expand their customer base, the company is developing similar software for the analysis of carbohydrates.