Transcriptic

Transcriptic aims to accelerate drug discovery and synthetic biology research by enabling scientists to focus on discoveries instead of labor-intensive bench work. Transcriptic was born out of asking a simple question: what technology needs to exist to enable someone to start a biotech company with nothing more than a laptop? We found there to be huge structural inefficiencies in the industry: expensive labs, manual-labor-intensive processes and long timelines. Amgen published a study in Nature in 2012 in which they attempted to reproduce 53 "landmark" cancer papers but could only validate 6 (11%!). Without significant technical and operational improvements, the life sciences was an extremely uninviting market for new companies. Even when big companies could afford the hardware, they ended up hiring lots of technicians and support staff to look after them: they just became different companies. The concerns of lab execution and scientific creativity needed to be separated out.

To fulfill our vision we have built a programmable robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences. We design, build, own, and operate automated molecular biology infrastructure to empower scientists to perform experiments remotely. We bring "cloud computing" to experimental biology to enable labless biotech, rapid drug discovery, and frictionless production-scale workflows. We care deeply about science and are working to advance scientific access and capability. Scientists define their experiments in our system using Autoprotocol, an open standard for encoding biological protocols in a machine and human readable format (http://autoprotocol.org/).

Transcriptic's virtualized "cloud" model allows scientists to focus on the content of their research while accessing a state-of-the-art lab environment with no upfront investment. Our dream is to enable coffee shop startups to go after drug discovery and synthetic biology (not just photo sharing apps). In addition to our cloud lab offering, Transcriptic is also implementing our technology at partner sites, such as Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston (https://goo.gl/JosL4H). Onsite deployment gives our customers a private cloud lab so they can benefit from our way of doing science but without having to use us as a remote execution facility.

https://github.com/transcriptic
http://autoprotocol.org/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyhBFxVE9ebyYkDpedp-34Q
https://twitter.com/transcriptic
https://www.linkedin.com/company/transcriptic/
https://www.instagram.com/transcripticlab/