About
About Noviota
A private biotechnology research company working on computational and programmable approaches to infectious disease and immunology.
Who we are
Representation beneath computational biology.
We are interested in a problem that sits beneath much of modern computational biology: how to represent biological systems in forms that are sufficiently structured for computation while retaining the mechanisms, context, evidence and provenance that give biological information meaning.
Our work spans infectious disease, immunology, computational biology and biological engineering. We develop research, software and experimental methods that explore the progression from representation to modelling, reasoning and, ultimately, design.
Noviota takes a long-term approach. The programme is intended to develop through research, technical experimentation, collaboration and publication rather than being organised around a short-term product roadmap.
The website is intended to look credible with a small amount of excellent material now, and to become richer as the work develops.
Why this focus
Why infectious disease and immunology?
Infection and immunology expose many of the hardest problems in biological representation. Pathogen and host interact across molecular, cellular, organismal and environmental scales; biological state changes over time; evidence is distributed across experiments and literature; and apparently similar mechanisms can behave differently in different hosts and contexts. These systems therefore provide both an important scientific problem and a demanding test of computational representation and reasoning.
Scope
A cross-species perspective.
Our interests extend across human and animal health. This reflects the shared biology of many infectious processes and the importance of animal hosts, reservoirs and comparative systems, while recognising that meaningful computational models must preserve species-specific and contextual differences.
Common questions
Frequently asked.
What is Noviota?
Noviota is a private biotechnology research company working on computational and programmable approaches to infectious disease and immunology. Our work spans infectious disease, immunology, computational biology and biological engineering, and develops through research, software and publication rather than a short-term product roadmap.
What do you mean by "representation" in biology?
By representation we mean expressing biological entities, interactions, mechanisms, evidence and context in structured, computational forms that a computer can reason about — without losing the biological meaning that makes those systems useful. Representation is the foundation on which modelling, reasoning and, ultimately, design depend.
What is Sybil?
Sybil is an experimental domain-specific language for computational biology. It explores how biological systems and designs can be expressed in a structured, inspectable form suitable for validation, transformation and computational reasoning, developed with interoperability with SBOL3 and related standards in mind rather than as a replacement for them.
Do you work across human and animal health?
Yes. Many mechanisms of infection, transmission and immunology recur across species, and emerging diseases often arise at the interfaces between humans, animals and their environments. We treat infectious disease as a biological problem extending across human and animal health, while preserving species-specific and contextual differences.
How does your work relate to standards like SBOL3?
We treat standards and interoperability as preferable to isolated representations wherever they can preserve the required biological meaning. Sybil and related work are designed to interoperate with SBOL3 and established biological standards, not to replace them.
What kinds of collaborations do you take on?
We collaborate selectively, where a problem requires careful biological thinking alongside computational structure — biological knowledge representation, computational research prototypes, infectious-disease research support and early-stage biological design infrastructure. We are not a general-purpose development agency or a management consultancy.
Where is your research published?
We publish research notes, technical work and longer-form writing to Insights as the programme develops. We publish when a piece of work, method or argument is worth making available, and we favour material that remains useful beyond the week in which it appears.