About
Lacuna is also a genus of sea snails, which is where our snail comes from. To us the word stands for the gap between the solutions life science companies develop and the practical problems researchers face every day.
Plate LXXII, Lacuna. Forbes & Hanley, A History of British Mollusca, 1849. Engraved by G. B. Sowerby Jun. Public domain.
Why we exist
We believe the gap exists largely because we’ve been looking at sales from the wrong direction. Traditional prospecting starts with a solution. Find people who might need it. Reach out. Ask about their challenges. Hope there’s a match.
Reaching out to researchers with solutions to problems they don’t have is a waste of their time, and yours. Their job isn’t to talk to salespeople. Their job is to do research.
Your job isn’t to take up their valuable time. Your job is to solve their problems.
And they’ve already told you what their problems are. Researchers document their work in extraordinary detail: their methods, the limitations of their experiments, the compromises they made and the workarounds they built to get results. Not every limitation is a problem worth solving, and not every problem needs a new product. But those clues give us something far more valuable than a list of names and email addresses.
A reason to care, and potentially a reason for the researcher to care about you.
How we work
We identify practical challenges in scientific research, interpret the evidence behind them and connect them to companies whose products, technologies or expertise might offer a solution. Instead of another list of researchers who happen to work in a relevant field, you see the researcher, the problem, the evidence and why we believe your solution could be relevant.
Every contact and every derived fact carries its confidence. A verified email was found on an institutional page or in the paper itself; an assumed one was inferred from a pattern and says so. You always know what you are acting on.
Every reported problem is checked against the sentence it came from, and the ones that do not hold up are deleted rather than served. That is why our verified count is smaller than our extracted count. We publish both.
We tell you which researchers publish with a competitor's product and what they said about their own results. We will not tell you that a competitor's product is bad: the first is evidence, the second is a claim no public source can carry.
Every figure on these pages is counted from the database, so the numbers move as the data grows. Nothing here is a marketing figure with a nice shape.
Today: 50,815 researchers with deep profiles in 148 countries, 30,404 verified quotes from 14,860 researchers, and 7,622 products named in methods sections.
Where the data comes from
The international researcher registry, the biomedical literature with its open-access full text and preprints, research funders in Europe, North America and Asia, clinical-trial registries and EU public procurement. Institutions’ own staff and lab pages for contact detail. No scraped social profiles, no bought lists, no hidden profiles.
The sources of personal data are named, with what we hold, why, and how to ask us about your own record, on the privacy page. Lacuna Bio is built and run by 4Front 2 Market AB in Sweden.
Bring one product. We'll show you who described the problem it solves, the evidence, and why they might want to hear from you.
