6/21/2023 0 Comments Transcriptic robotize![]() ![]() Humans add value by writing papers and running creative experiments that test sophisticated hypotheses. “The humans don?t add value in going to the bench and doing this stuff by hand. “Most of biology is in the analysis,” Hodak says inside his office. Hodak’s proposed solution is a company that tries to do for biologists what Amazon Web Services does for information technology: by making basic services cheap and accessible over the web, it lets customers try things that were not previously possible. ![]() And if they should make a mistake, they might not even notice for weeks. Other times they spend days on end doing work that is essentially robotic?transferring liquid from one small well to another. Sometimes researchers have to wait days or weeks to use a particular machine. But Hodak spent much of his time as an undergraduate at Duke University researching brain-machine interfaces, and saw firsthand how much time in the lab is wasted. That company, MyFit, focused on helping students identify the right colleges. A native of New York City, Hodak built and sold his previous startup before he could legally drink. That feeling was familiar to Max Hodak, the 24-year-old entrepreneur who founded Transcriptic nearly two years ago. ![]() “It?s a fact that I?ve wasted many hours of my life moving my hand around to transport small volumes of liquid from one tube to another.” “Are you really going to automate all the nuance that is biology?” But Byers, who earned his PhD in bioengineering from Stanford, came around in part because of his own experiences in labs. “At first I was like, this is kind of crazy,” says Blake Byers, a partner at Google Ventures, which led a $1.2 million seed investment in Transcriptic last December. But recently, Transcriptic invited The Verge to come look behind the curtain?the work cell is normally hidden behind an actual, physical curtain?to see how the company is using robotics to do work that has previously been the province of PhDs. The company had never previously allowed journalists inside its walls. The heart of Transcriptic is what it calls the “work cell,” the automated lab where the robot arm performs its duties: manipulating samples using the various connected machines that run protocols. Since July, the number of customers has roughly doubled every month. Early customers include Stanford the California Institute of Technology the University of California, San Diego and the University of Chicago. The company began taking orders from all comers earlier this year, selling services including cell cloning, genotyping, and biobanking. Costs for the service start at a few dollars per test, and the turnaround time is typically limited only by how long it takes for cells to divide. Scientists send in raw materials?DNA, for example, or biopsied mouse tissue?and tell Transcriptic what to do with it. Transcriptic’s small team is calibrating the robot arm, which serves as the linchpin of the company’s efforts to transform life-science research by making it cheaper and more accessible. Within a few minutes its work is done: the arm has pipetted the logo for Transcriptic, a fast-growing, Google Ventures-backed robotics startup that could upend the way biologists do their research. With rapid, precise movements, the arm pipettes colored liquids into wells on a tray. Inside a nondescript office park in Silicon Valley, a robotic arm is running a test. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |