• In light of the pandemic, this article emphasizes the significance of digital transformation in the life sciences sector. It examines how software provider Benchling has responded to the difficulties faced by researchers and developers.
• The cloud-based platform Benchling offers for data organization, collaboration, and analysis has greatly increased scientific research's productivity and inventiveness.
• Reading this article will provide you insights into how digital technology affects research and development procedures as well as how it helps the life sciences advance more quickly.
The recent Covid epidemic has driven almost all businesses to adopt digital. And here not only talking about the escalation of Zoom, Instagram, TikTok, and many more. The pandemic has undeniably spurred the expansion of the life sciences industry, and most crucially, digital transformation is proving to be a crucial lifeline for developing treatments, vaccines, and solutions for COVID-19.
A year ago, researchers struggled to figure out the enormous mystery that was the coronavirus. In this case, the industry was faced with the most difficult task: coming up with the best strategies to support clinical researchers in finding safe, effective treatments and in properly manufacturing and dispensing them.
In certain situations, collaborations were quickly formed to increase manufacturing capacity for essential COVID-19 equipment. This drove researchers into uncharted terrain, such as applying AI to uncover cures and manufacturers working with scientists and researchers to design tests.
Digital technology must also be applied at every touch point of the health sciences business in order to keep up in a world where everything from vaccine testing to the supply chain has been driven by digital momentum.
The COVID-19 epidemic made remote work and collaboration capabilities even more essential to scientific study.
What is Benchling?
Benchling, a cloud-based platform, promotes remote cooperation and flexibility in scientific endeavors by enabling scientists to access and work on their data from any location. The life sciences sector has a famously delayed history of adopting new technologies, typically only doing so when absolutely necessary.
This is partially attributable to the sector's cautious attitude to regulation, which unintentionally worked against innovation. This is no longer the case, however, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made digital technology an operational necessity rather than a supplemental extra. As a result, the old resistance or hesitation has given way to a new need for innovation in the health sciences.
Digitization can assist life science organizations in improving patient outcomes and healthcare services such as personalized medication. Businesses can use data to enhance the performance of their products.
With the use of life sciences software, researchers can learn more about pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, food and medication based on biotechnology, and other life science items.
With the aid of technologies like life sciences software, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT), scientists can solve issues and reach superior conclusions.
Advanced data analytics in life sciences software enables researchers to find patterns and trends in data sets for a deeper understanding of workflows and processes.
Experts predict the life science analytics market will experience exponential annual growth of 12.75% from 2022-2029. Digital ecosystems can help fill the life science innovation gap and enhance pipeline development.
How did it come to be?
Benchling was founded in 2012 at MIT, where our founders saw a clear need for modern technology and tools to enable their scientific research. Sajith Wickramasekara and Ashu Singhal, two MIT students, founded Benchling in 2012 to address the issue of the biotech industry's delayed research.
At the time, there wasn't a lot of software available at the time that could assist biological research. As a result, scientists were forced to use paper lab notes and spreadsheets to document their findings. Data collection, later reference, and data sharing across teams became challenging by these methods.
Benchling released a cloud-based research and development notebook three years later with the goal of accelerating experimentation by researchers. Before Benchling's software reduced that time to 10 seconds, scientists reportedly used techniques that required roughly 24 hours to produce results. So easy to use and understand, it's like transforming a staircase to an escalator.
With Benchling at their disposal, scientists can focus on what really matters: science and innovation, rather than wasting hours searching for information across these dispersed sources.
They require cutting-edge software to keep up with the pace of research and development in a field where so many cutting-edge discoveries are being made in fields like medicine, agriculture, food, and energy, among others.
More multi-dimensional data sets are being created at a rapid rate as the rate of scientific progress quickens, and life sciences research is producing orders of magnitude more data than it ever has.
So what is different about it?
Benchling is a uniform platform for scientific data. They conceptualize this platformed strategy along the axes of uniformity, automation, and centralization. They can answer new questions that were previously unanswerable with centralized data in a single location, standardized data that adheres to a predefined data shape, and automatic data capture as experiments are executed. The options are unlimited.
Utilizing user-friendly interfaces, scientists may organize and monitor their studies. They are able to create experiments, design methods, and systematically record observations.
- Benchling enables scientists to centrally store and arrange their experimental data in a way that makes it easy to find afterward.
- Keeping experimental data, pictures, and other pertinent materials is a part of this. Your biological sequences and experimental notes can be stored and analyzed on a single platform.
- In addition to other things, you can model cloning assemblies, annotate constructs, make sequence alignments, and design primers. Directly connect these sequences in your Benchling Notebook to create a single source of truth that replaces paper and spreadsheets.
- Keep track of and search through all of your team's data in one location, including spreadsheets, image files, sequences, procedures, and in-depth notes.
- The platform supports data analysis through integration with other tools or by providing built-in analysis capabilities. It enables researchers to analyze their experimental data and generate insights.
- Even as a student you no longer need to write all repetitive processes in your journal, this software is really helpful in documenting and you can explore more.
For operations including creating and copying DNA sequences, managing plasmids, and creating primers, the platform offers molecular biology capabilities. These instruments aid scientists in streamlining their molecular biology processes.
Benchling helps to speed up the entire research and development (R&D) process by reducing workflows, improving data management, and fostering cooperation. This accelerated scientific progress, enhanced medication development processes, and improved life sciences innovation can all result from this increased efficiency.
Benchling fosters scientific collaboration by offering tools for exchanging data, procedures, and results. It enables real-time collaboration, conversation, and experiment commenting.
Funding
90% more users adopt new systems than older systems. The efficiency of the R&D team has grown multiple, and the time from experimentation to data has lowered by 85%.
With investors including Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Spark Capital, and Thrive Capital, they raised $200 million in their series E round in 2021.
With a $6.1 billion value and $425 million in funding since its inception, Benchling has developed into a valuable resource for more than 200,000 scientists at more than 900 biotech firms.
For all the high school kids who have to write every reaction in their journal, now can easily do it in software and understand the process better. Now not in only finance, design, medical; Life science and research also have a path for their future of digitizing processes and products.
By digitizing and streamlining laboratory procedures, data management, and collaboration, Benchling promises to increase productivity and efficiency in scientific research.
It is used in many biotech and pharmaceutical firms, and other life science organizations. Benchling's ability to promote efficiency, collaboration, and creativity will ultimately determine how the biological sciences develop in the future.
Edited by Shruti Thapa