A few words to introduce yourself?
I’m Jörn SCHMIEDEL. I’m the lead computational scientist at Ochre Bio. I have a PHD in biophysics and I have been working in computational biology and genomics for about 15 years now. At Ochre Bio, we’ve been trying to develop holistic computational biology platforms that are able to analyse and aggregate all the genomics data we’ve been producing and generating in the company.
Ochre Bio is an Oxford based biotech startup. It’s been founded in 2019. I joined in early 2021 when we were about 10 people and had one lab in Oxford. Nowadays, so August 2022, we’re about 60 people in 4 labs spread across the world. So we have 2 labs in Oxford, we have 1 lab in Taipei and we have a lab in New York City We do collaborate with 2 big University Centers, which is Yale and LifeShare in Oklahoma City.
Ochre Bio is focused on developing RNA therapies and deliver transplants banks so that’s a huge unmet need where about a quarter of people in the world have fatty livers and are therefore looking for transplants. But on the other hand, fatty livers cannot be transplanted themselves. So there’s kind of an attrition going on on both sides and we’re trying to develop therapies to defat these livers. We have a whole cycle going all the way from discovery through to development and really pre-clinical testing. We’re generating a lot of genomics data deep phenotyping livers to really understand what’s going on if a liver is fatty and which kind of genes we might be able to target. And so that’s really where computational biology comes in we process big datasets. We analyse them, we distil information out of them and we aggregate all the different bits and pieces of information we do get to really discover new therapeutic molecules. Then we develop them in house and actually do test them in transplant livers in order to be able to, at some point, defat transplant livers and to put them into patients.
Why did you reach out to Data Champ’ last December?
We are working on aggregating all the data we have. We’re a team of about 5 to 6 computational biologists in the company, mostly all coming from scientific backgrounds, so we’re really trained in analysing big genomics datasets, big data, machine learning, all these kind of things. What we’ve been lacking is somebody who’s more skilled in software development and kind of frontend development. As we wanted to build an interface that aggregates all the data and is able to display it to all scientists in the company but also to external stakeholders, investors, and really the public. We wanted to build a Shiny interface that everyone can then interact with, without having much knowledge of the underlying data and all the complexities. So we’ve been looking for a front end developer for Shiny Applications.
We reached out to a couple distinct consultancies looking for people and in the end we found Charles on Toptal and hired him as the front end developer for Shiny.
Did you consider others solutions, other freelancers at Toptal or other companies?
We reached out to 4 different consulting agencies and also talked to a couple people. But there wasn’t really any good candidates. So when we found you we were quite convinced that this might be something that could work out. Just from the work you showed us and just our interactions, our really basic interactions. All the other potential candidates that we had it didn’t look like this would be a good fit for us.
How was the collaboration from your point of view? Was it what you expected at the beginning?
I mean for us it has been a really smooth cooperation. We got going quickly and I had the feeling from the beginning that you were really proactive in trying to set this up, trying to get up to speed with what we’re doing and really trying to see what we currently have, what’s the status quo and where do we want to go. And yeah, we were really surprised with how quickly all the different tasks that we had in mind got done.
So quickly, it felt like we were running out of work a little bit. And so this kind of quickly morphed into “Well, it’s so quick to do all these front end Shiny things, we can actually start rebuilding completely. Not only the front end but the whole Shiny Application”. So we reconfigured the whole setup, made it more interactive, made it quicker, made it look nicer. You became more and more involved quickly also with the back end work, and you were definitely much more advanced in Shiny back end than we’ve ever been. So it was a good fit to be not only the front end developer, but the general Shiny developer for the company.
What started as front development ended up being more and more AWS administration. What made you delegate AWS tasks to me?
It quickly became clear. Once you started doing front end and once you had done all the front end, you started doing more of the back end clean. We thought about, for example, setting up a restricted access to our Insilico Liver app, which is the app we wanted to develop. It was about setting up user pools, and having it interact with our main identity provider JumpCloud. When you quickly started doing that, it just became clear that you were clearly on top of everything that goes on in the back end and also with AWS. It was a no-brainer to just ask you do to more things, like setting up a private virtual subnet and moving all of our server infrastructure into these private subnets. And then just reconfiguring generally how we’re going on about AWS infrastructure making it more secure, making it easier to manage, making it easier to survey what’s going on, all these kind of things…
Are you satisfied with what’s been achieved out of this collaboration? How do you feel today?
I think, yeah, we’re very much satisfied. And really I think I wouldn’t going back. I don’t think we would do anything different because I think the whole thing grew out of for us, a need to have somebody to just do a specific task, like front end development, and then quickly learning that the experience you’re bringing is useful. For tasks we hadn’t even thought about, or tasks we’d been doing but didn’t really know how to do. So it just morphed into something more and I don’t think we would go back doing anything differently.
Also, the communication was always quick, very professional and very well structured. That’s also something I really appreciate as somebody managing a team of people and interacting with other team leaders in the company. Just the structured way of how you communicated with me was very nice, just very well structured, very proactive. Getting a message from you it’s clear. What’s the issue, what have you done to resolve it for yourself and done.
Is there anything you would like to add?
I mean, I was super happy. It’s been a really pleasant collaboration and it’s ongoing. Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything to change about this. I’m looking forward to what’s going to change over the next couple of months, like how you’re going to further develop now. We’re thinking about basically making you our main AWS admin. And there’s many more things to come that we don’t know right now, but it feels like you’re now a part-time employee of the company and I’m very happy about that.
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