Anvil Informatics' formation was based on the computational biology collaboration initiated in 1992 between Dr. Georges Grinstein and Dr. Kenneth Marx, both faculty members at University of Massachusetts Lowell at the time.

During the next four years, the collaborative group worked together applying high-dimensional data visualization techniques to DNA sequence information. They developed GenVis, a UNIX, X-Windows and Motif- based software platform. GenVis takes a DNA sequence of any length and performs calculations of functions for that sequence using a moving window approach. User defined functions may be added as modules to GenVis. GenVis has been exclusively licensed to Anvil Informatics.

In 1995, Dr. Marx initiated collaboration in bioinformatics with Dr. Ivo Grosse in the group of Professor Eugene Stanley at the Center for Polymer Studies, Department of Physics, Boston University.

In 1996, Dr. Marx applied for and received an Innovative Data Analysis Grant in a national Grants competition from Pfizer Central Research Inc. in Groton, CT. This led the collaboration of Dr. Grinstein, Dr. Marx, Dr. Stanley and Dr. Grosse on application of information theory based approaches to DNA exon/intron sequence and protein sequence classification. The research was focused on the DNA classification problem and achieved a core algorithm classification accuracy on standardized data sets better than that found in the current generation of gene finding algorithms.

In 1998, Dr. Grinstein and Dr. Marx visited a number of Boston/New England area biotechnology, genomics, and pharmaceutical companies, making presentations about the group's molecular biological visualization and data mining capabilities. Up till now, the Anvil team accomplished the following bioinformatics consulting projects:

• Data mining and visualization project for Pfizer, analyzing their DNA and protein sequences;
• Exploration of Gene expression data in yeast for Genetic Institute, Inc.
• Exploration of unknown protein sequences from high-throughput screening data for Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.