Thursday, September 1, 2011

Life sciences IT firm Dotmatics grows in Woburn

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

Article updated as of 8:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 2.

Dotmatics Ltd., a privately held company that provides Web-based database integration and visualization tools for the life sciences industry, said it has moved to larger facilities in Woburn.

The UK-based company said the move from Boston's financial district, where it has been operating since 2006, was made to keep pace with increased customer and business demands.

“We needed to be in a more prominent office space,” said Shikha O’Brien, who was appointed vice president of U.S. business development last October to oversee the growth and expansion of the company’s software and technology platform in North America. O’Brien has more than 10 years of experience in drug discovery informatics. She previously was with the Life Science division of Accelrys and MSI.

In conjunction with the relocation, Dotmatics is adding people in the areas of scientific support, account management, and marketing to accelerate its U.S. expansion. It had
two employees each in its Boston and San Diego offices, but has been expanding both to a total of 12 U.S. employees over the last six months. O’Brien said an unspecified  number of employees may still be added in sales, marketing, and customer support. The company, including the UK parent, has more than 50 employees, and plans to expand that to 60-plus by year end.

Dotmatics, which was spun out of Merck, is a scientific software company with products that aim to improve the way scientific data is queried, browsed, managed, and shared within companies. Dotmatics has expertise in chem- and bio- informatics techniques, including chemical databases, SAR analysis, data management, and data visualization.

The company was founded in 2005 and is headquartered south of Cambridge, UK, in Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire.