It was a year of change. A year ago, we set a goal to increase our presence in life sciences, and… we did it. We ended this year with 8 out of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies as our active customers.

Why Did We Choose Life Sciences?

Life sciences is a broad sector focused on studying and applying biology, biotechnology, and related sciences to improve human, animal, and environmental health. Key components of this industry are pharmaceutical companies, biotech, medical devices, diagnostics, healthcare, clinical research, genomics, personalized medicine, and agriculture.

We are specialists in R and Python. These programming languages play special roles in drug discovery, clinical trials, and the life sciences field in general. They are used by scientists, researchers, biostatisticians and other experts in their work. Usually, our customers start their prototypes, and then Appsilon helps speed up the development and make it production-ready or compliant with FDA regulations (Good Software Engineering Practice).

Our company’s purpose (mission) is to Advance Technology to Preserve and Improve Life on Earth. Working for customers from the life sciences industry gives us focus on fulfilling it not only through our Data for Good initiative.

What Do We Build for Life Sciences Customers?

[1/4] Dashboards in Shiny for R and Python. Such dashboards are used in drug development, clinical trials and reporting, drug manufacturing, drug safety (pharmacovigilance), and more.

[2/4] Large custom decision support systems in Python and React. Sometimes we build it from scratch, starting with UX design and classic web development workflow. Sometimes, it starts from a prototype in Shiny, proves a big business impact, and then goes really big. Like a global supply management system that we implemented for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

[3/4] Statistical Computing Environments (SCE) and other custom infrastructure/platforms. Scientists, researchers, biostatisticians, and other experts use SCE to perform research and data science using R and Python. Such a platform enables collaboration, reproducibility, and access to computing resources required for the research process.

[4/4] GxP consulting in software engineering. Pharma companies creating a new drug must pass many requirements regarding the quality of the code, data, and applications used for research set by the FDA and EMA. We are world-class specialists in code quality and good software practices for R and Python development.

What Did We Achieve in 2024?

97% of the new business revenue (new customers) came from Life Sciences.

We have acquired the largest number of new customers from Life Sciences in our history, including pharma companies from the Top 10.

We delivered the first commercial dashboard in Shiny for Python for Fortune 500 customer

A record 17,000 candidates applied to Appsilon. It is extremely difficult to get into our team because we set high requirements. The best ones will work with the world's largest brands on very interesting projects.

Our visibility in the life sciences industry has increased significantly. We contribute to the Pharmaverse council. We were visible at Phuse, BiotechX, and R/Pharma Summit. We organized the GxP Summit.

We co-authored a scientific article got published in Nature Biotechnology in collaboration with the JSB Lab, led by Jonathan Schmid-Burgk at University of Bonn (announcement by our Head of AI, Jędrzej Świeżewski). Our team contributed to the establishment of a new method called Nuclear In-Situ Sequencing (NIS-Seq), which improves how we screen cells at high density and complexity.

The new technology enables genome-wide optical CRISPR-Screens in nucleated cells, which elucidates inflammation-related pathways.This is a significant step forward for high content screening (HCS) research, and we’re looking forward to seeing where this technology can take us next! Check out the full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02516-5

We developed a lot of innovative solutions in the Life Sciences field, such as detecting protein crystals with AI. Every crystal can be a potential new drug, so it is better not to miss them.

Key Moments in 2024

Olga Mierzwa-Sulima became our CEO and Filip Stachura took the role of Head of Innovation.

Shiny Conf by Appsilon - the largest Shiny conference in the world. This year, we had 73 speakers who gave exciting talks and more than 1000 attendees from all over the world. Read the summary in this post.

Our R package Rhino gets traction as a tool for building GxP-compliant Shiny apps. Our open-source packages were downloaded 200.000+ times in 2024.

GxP Summit - we organized the first event related to the best software engineering practices required to get smoothly through the FDA / EMA submission process.

We visited a lot of our customers and partners to work together and grow our collaboration.

Retreat in Warka - Again, the Appsilon Team arrived in Poland to work together for a week and integrate. We have a team in almost all time zones, but we feel like we are close colleagues who are building something special together.

We Have Ambitious Plans for 2025

We are going to increase our presence in the Life Sciences industry. If you want to stay updated, observe our blog. We will be hiring a lot of new specialists, so check out our careers page. We are planning a lot of exciting events, open-source contributions, and AI innovation.

Let’s go! 🚀