•Notícia

Until now, the most advanced digital viewing technology was only available to highly specialized sectors, but with GenomEdu, this technology will reach the sphere of education.

Xavier Messeguer of the UPC-Barcelona Tech Department of Software began the process of gestating this project with a simple question: Why can't we make a tool like Google Maps that allows us to zoom in to the DNA level from a general image? This led to a university project that—over the years and with the support of Caterina Sampol, the company's manager and a mathematician, and Roman Roset, the technical director and a computer engineer—has become a real company with an international spirit.

GenZoom, Gen360 and Gen3D are the three basic products on the GenomEdu educational portal. GenZoom technology allows a continuous zoom based on a succession of real digital photographs at different levels of magnification up to the genome level. Gen360 allows you to turn an organ in different directions on the screen thanks to photographs taken from a succession of different angles. Gen3D allows you to reconstruct the human body in 3D by introducing, for instance, the data file from a tomography.

This is made possible by the technical supervision of Roman Roset, a specialist in semantic and social web 2.0 issues and one of the keys to the success of the company created by Professor Messeguer.

With web 2.0 technology, users (in this case, the faculty of the GenomEdu virtual classroom) can contribute their knowledge and include other content, personalizing the application by adding, for instance, labels to the images of human organs, or notes that will be accessible to students. The methodology followed by the web 2.0 programmers, according to Roset, is fast, flexible and rigorous because specific applications are used. “It's more than a technology, it's a method of operating that's being applied on the majority of webs,” declares Roset.
This philosophy has led them to develop a marketing strategy used by certain social networks: invitations or tickets. Roman Roset defines it as follows: “People who we know will put the product to a good use are given permission to access it; then they're given several invitations so they can invite people they know”.

GenomVisio owes its success to the entire company team. Xavier Messeguer states, “In addition to our programmers, Álvaro Villalba, Marc Musquera, Pablo Prieto and David Gómez, and the photographers Alba Artigas and Guifré de Peray, professionals in various fields are also involved, collaborators who have disinterestedly decided to form part of the project and who, along with more than fifteen investors, contribute the capital to make this possible”.

The UPC provides support through the Innova Programme and its guaranteed sponsorship of the spin-off. GenomVisio is a company working for a better future. “Our idea is to reach the greatest number of people possible. We want to continue to improve and innovate”. asserts Caterina Sampol.

They have already signed agreements with the UPC-Barcelona Tech School of Agricultural Engineering of Barcelona (ESAB), the UB Faculty of Biology and the Escola Betània–Patmos of Barcelona. Thanks to these agreements, faculty members will be able to personalize the portal, adapting it to their needs.

To date, GenomVisio has focused on analyzing the human body, but their short-term intentions are to apply the technology developed to the rest of living organisms, such as plants and animals, and even to manufactured objects. “In the near future, we wish to enter the fields of traumatology and dentistry to offer specialists the possibility of viewing results of patient analyses such as scans in 3D”, concludes Xavier Messeguer.