A hundred years of network science, pointed at your disease community.

Six degrees begins as a parlor game

In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called “Chains,” about friends playing a game — trying to link themselves to any person on earth through no more than five intermediaries. Thus was born the concept of six degrees of separation: the network-theory idea that any two people are connected through a chain of six or fewer relationships.

Intelligence services learn to map a network they cannot see

Intelligence organizations had long understood the importance of networks, but the first rigorous approach came in Malaya, beginning in 1948, where British intelligence developed a robust methodology to map networks linked to communist insurgents.

Military intelligence organizations became early adopters of network modeling, and with the emergence of terrorism as a global security issue, network analytics became a core tool — leveraging vast amounts of data to understand complex global organizations.

A letter experiment turns the parlor game into evidence

Mathematicians had begun building the foundation of Sipher6 technology through the 1950s and 60s, working on the problem of real-world networks, where connections do not follow a normal distribution. In 1967, Stanley Milgram tested six degrees empirically in his “small-world” letter experiment — successful chains averaged about six intermediaries.

Ideas spread through informal collaboration, not org charts

Academics were considering the same mathematics in the sociology of the life sciences. Diana Crane’s Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities explored how informal scientific collaboration — as illustrated by the British Royal Society — is central to the spread of information and the adoption of ideas.

Networks become dynamic systems

The scale-free model explained that network behavior can be understood through clustering and power laws, like preferential attachment — the rich get richer. The mathematics exploded when physicists began applying statistical mechanics, treating networks as dynamic complex systems, much like interacting molecules. Modern network analytics was born.

Voxx Analytics brings the method to the life sciences

All of it came together in pharma with the formation of Voxx Analytics in 2010 — a company that applied military intelligence methodologies to understanding scientific influence in the life sciences.

Decoding the ciphers in your disease community

Sipher6, founded by Voxx’s founder, takes that to the next level — applying modern technology to the pragmatic goal of mapping impact in scientific and medical communities. That is the origin of the name. We decode the ciphers hidden in your disease community data and the six-degree paths that connect every KOL, HCP, institution and decision-maker to your strategy — and create the outcomes you want.