Heroku for Science

I studied biomedical engineering at Hopkins. Before I started there, research was the promised land. I dreamt of spending my time thinking about how to solve critical problems and testing solutions.

What I saw instead were people spending the vast majority of their time pipetting. All the way up the ladder, upto and including postdocs. I sometimes thought our PI had it worse for having to spend most of her time applying for grants.

The AWSification of synbio research would be a game changer. Some labs at Hopkins have tried to build robots but with limited success. Given how cheap labor is at research institutions competing on price will be incredibly difficult.

There's been quite a few efforts in this. See Transcriptic and Emerald Therapeutics (http://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/), while there's the more traditional suppliers for things like short oligos or expression vectors (https://www.dna20.com/ and http://www.idt.com/).

I think there's also been a lot of independent academic attempts at this (see: http://klavinslab.org/ which is CS/BioE at UWash), but all kind of waded around in the shallow water.

The reason why I think this is compelling because I think almost every synthetic biologist has an existing workflow. It's basically design using some sort of CAD software, order from IDT, receive materials next day, run test by hand, ship to Genewiz for sequencing, etc. That's just one example of a workflow involving 4-5 specialized 'steps'. As the steps get cheaper/faster/better, consolidating and automating this is just a no brainer.

A big problem is that scientists are traditionally very secretive. This would increase the possibility of leaks, and there'd need to be some way of assuring that the experiment was conducted correctly. Good idea, though.

There could be some synergies with (yc12) science exchange

Hey! Founder of Transcriptic here. This is exactly what we are. We're growing quickly and have customers at over a dozen academic institutions now. One of our key issues right now is that biologists aren't programmers and so we're doing a lot of hand-holding - we'd get really excited about someone building higher level tools (Heroku to our AWS) on top of us for specific domains that you know better than we do.

If anyone in this thread thinks this is an interesting topic I'm easy to reach at max@transcriptic.com.