2016 in review

by | Dec 31, 2016 | Last Month in Tweets | 0 comments

2016 in review

“Last Month in Tweets” was on again, off again in 2016. Apologies, we’ll be more consistent with monthly updates across the board in 2017. For now, let’s relive the best moments of 2016 at Perlara!

Although I wasn’t able to announce it publicly for several months, we learned in the first week of January that we’d been accepted into YC’s Winter 2016 batch. We were still Perlstein Lab aka PLab at the time, as summarized in this feature in Popular Science:

As committed as we are to Open Science, we’re equally committed to Open Finances. In other words, it’s not enough to blog and tweet about research in real-time. You can’t have reproducibility and accountability without knowing the financial data behind the scientific data. For example, this series of burn rate posts penned by our virtual CFO Tom Ruginis (CEO @ HappiLabs):

The first momentous news of the year as I alluded to above was our acceptance into YC, which changed the trajectory of the company (as I blogged here):

We continued to blog about our Niemann-Pick C lead program and lead compound PERL101. Look for Part 4 to drop in early January. Much more detail on what PerlQuest joint drug discovery partnerships are in the new year, too. For now think about the PERL101 blogs (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) as the first PerlQuest in progress.

The core tenet of our company culture is diversity, reflecting the diversity of rare disease families. In 2016 our headcount grew from 6 to 8. We look forward to further expansion in 2017.

Perlara attended its third Parseghian conference. The meeting returned home to Arizona. By next year’s meeting we’ll know whether the PERL101 chemical series is on a pathway toward IND. We’ll also have made progress on several other LSDs by June 2017.

Summer was high season for science communication. We attended several conferences and took the blog:

The second big news of the year was our rebrand from PLab to Perlara. We announced our name change and new site at Global Genes:

In October, two years of hard work came together in the form of a validating deal with NIBR.

Normally things slow down after Thanksgiving, but that’s when the last bout of good news streamed in. In fact, we were working till yesterday afternoon to close our third partnership – that’s 3 in as many months.

We’re putting the finishing touches on a PerlQuest FAQ now, and it will go live in less than two weeks. Thanks for taking a quick stroll down memory lane. Onward 2017!

Translate »