Data sharing in life sciences starts with electronic notebook — A live event by Benchling

By Cicely Zhu

Thursday July 25th, 2019 San Diego

5:30 p.m. is golden time after work at the “Farmer & The Seashore” restaurant. A few dozen of biotech scientists and sales marketing professionals are lining up for happy hour wine and beer. Hidden at an up-scale office plaza off Torrey Pines road where the big biotech institutions like Johnson & Johnson, Scripps Clinical Research, Vortex, and BD  (Becton Dickenson) are located, Benchling, a software company based in San Francisco California, is hosting a free social gathering event — ” Learn from Life Science R&D Leaders”.

“In the old days we talk about blackberry (as the cellphone), but where is blackberry today?” Says Reed Molbak, Product Manager of benchling, a 30 something bald guy with well-trimmed sideburns. The Benchling software is replacing “Vector NTI” which was discontinued by Thermo Fisher.

“We are building an awesome electronic notebook system, and we only need the scientists to input the data once,” Reed emphasizes. “Then we can make it accessible for any future sharing.”

Co-Founded in 2012 by its CEO Sajith Wickramasekara, a MIT graduate now in his 30s, Benchling is a cloud-based informatics platform for life science Research and Development (R&D). Its vision is to “Help R&D organizations accelerate the research life cycle to improve the lives of all people.”

According to Wickramasekara’s article “The Only Path Forward for Biotech” in the “Benchwalk” magazine, the booming era for bitotech has come recently with technology such as CAR-T, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and gene therapy. “By 2022, the majority of top 100 drugs on the market will be biologics.”

Compared to traditional small molecules, biologics require more complex data sharing. A good example would be recombinant DNA. “In the early 2000s, scientists mailed paper sketches of plasmids and pages of printed-out sequences to each other.” Says Karmella Haynes, Professor of Emory University, “With Benchling, your updated, corrected and amended sequences and maps can be accessible to the public.”

According to the Benchling website, academics get free software. The 2018 Nobel Prize winner Francis Arnold’s lab in California Technology Institute and UC Berkley labs are among the user list. Regeneron, Pfizer, Zymergen, Incyte, Five Prime, Agenus are among the commercial user list.

As a startup company, Benchling just received its series C funding. Its mission: revolutionize the biotech industry. It might be just a matter of time.