History
The company was founded in 1997 as a spin-off from the German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF), Braunschweig, Germany, known today as the Helmholtz Research Centre for Infection Research. The founders were scientists of the GBF Research Group Bioinformatics, headed at that time by Edgar Wingender. The company is presently managed by Michael Tysiak (CEO/CFO) and Frank Schacherer (COO).
The company's original product was the TRANSFAC database, a platform for the description and analysis of gene regulatory events and networks. This was subsequently complemented by a number of smaller databases relevant to aspects of gene regulation, and by an early signaling pathway database (TRANSPATH). TRANSPATH constituted the earliest signaling pathway database, alongside the Cell Signaling Network Database (CSNDB) curated by T. Takai at the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS) in Tokyo.
By end of 1999, BIOBASE acquired venture capital from the IMH funds, now managed by Triginta Capital, by the MBG (Hannover; until 2007) and the tbg. In 2002, Intec W&G, Tokyo, Japan, invested in the company and remained a shareholder until 2005.
In early 2005, the company acquired the databases produced by Incyte, Wilmington, Delaware, USA, which were operated at the time by Incyte's subsidiary, Proteome Inc in Beverly, MA. The early flagship of Proteome was the Yeast Proteome Database (YPD), which was complemented by a number of similar databases. Their latest achievement before the acquisition was the Human Proteome Survey Database (HumanPSD).
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