Scientists Need a New Platform
More and more modern biology leverages recent and ongoing advances in cellular engineering. Stem cells are opening new pathways for regenerative therapies and other research, while other cell technologies (like CAR-T therapies) are increasingly used for everything from cancer to autoimmune disorders. Cellular engineering is also being used for fields beyond medicine, creating novel industrial compounds and growing resilient crops.
Yet despite parallel developments in automation and machine learning, most cellular engineering research remains tedious and labor intensive. Rather than investigating new avenues for research, scientists spend most of their time tending cells by hand, sacrificing nights and weekends in service of the finicky, error-ridden work of managing a handful of cell lines. Even in laboratories that have automated equipment, robotic hardware and data science software remain siloed, forcing scientists to fiddle with CSVs and JSON files rather than focus on their work.
Machine learning may seem ready to come to the rescue, but artificial intelligence requires annotated and curated datasets before it can start cutting through the noise. And while automated hardware can collect reams of data, such data remains unstructured and unwieldy, leaving AI-driven insights just out of reach.
Cutting-edge solutions are increasingly available, but researchers are hard-pressed to meaningfully implement them. Scientists are left with a lose-lose choice: limit the scale of their experiments to what they can manage on their own, or devote their time to trying to translate their vision onto impenetrable technologies.
Enter Monomer. Monomer is built to fuse automation with analytics, finally bringing modern software capabilities to the wet lab. We envision biology not as a cottage craft, but an engineering discipline where designs are modeled intentionally, experiments follow data-driven protocols, and solutions are identified methodically and refined deliberately.
Monomer Bridges the Gap Between Automation and AI
Monomer combines two critical capabilities.
First, we provide an automation platform to coordinate the dizzying array of hardware available for cell culture automation, seamlessly handling incubators, liquid handlers, imagers, robotic arms, and more. We handle the challenges of device integration, protocol translation, scheduling, and experiment tracking, customized to your use case and workflows.
Second, we enable a fundamentally new relationship with data. Monomer automatically aggregates parameters and results across automated operations into accessible, structured datasets amenable to cutting-edge analytics. No more wrangling spreadsheets and file folders filled with experimental data, images, and readouts. Alongside aggregating your data, we can integrate Monomer with your machine learning applications of choice or develop algorithms specifically for your use case, notifying you of plates in need of passaging, media exchange, or termination, and identifying characteristics that may be driving anomalous results. Soon, many of these functions will be available out of the box.
Our platform not only frees you from the rote work of tending to cell cultures, it also allows you to drastically expand the scale and complexity of your experiments. Instead of manually tending to a dozen cell lines, let Monomer automatically tend to thousands, indexing the performance of each and using ever-improving machine learning algorithms to surface results of interest.
Let Monomer handle the boring stuff, so that you can focus on decision-making and discovery.
Purpose Built for Scientists
Our team is acutely familiar with the stressors that come with cell culture: the time spent in lab on the tedious work of cell culture maintenance; the time spent at home worrying about what could go wrong; the time lost to experiments doomed by contamination or human error.
We’re building Monomer to shoulder those burdens, so that scientists can focus on building a better future.
As founders, we bring deep expertise in biotech robotics and artificial intelligence. I was on the founding team of StrateOS (formerly Transcriptic), which built the first cloud-based robotics lab for biology research. My co-founder Mark was an early employee of Kensho and led the front-end team in building intuitive machine learning applications for complex financial datasets. Together, we’re able to provide visionary leadership to bridge the gap between automation and artificial intelligence, and we’re lucky to be joined in this journey by an amazing team.
Cell Culture Today, Scientific Revolution Tomorrow
Cell culture automation is our first killer app. Today, Monomer can implement and integrate cell culture workcells, automating cell culture processes while passively aggregating growth data in a clean, cell-centric database, ready-made for machine learning analyses.
From cutting-edge biotech startups to leading research institutions, we’ve helped several customers automate their workflows, leveraging our platform to drive innovation in the development of cell and gene therapies, iPSC-derived organoids, medical implants, and more. We are ready to help laboratories big and small harness the power of automated workcells.
But we are not stopping with cell culture. Together with our customers, we will deliver automation and machine learning solutions for the full range of cell engineering processes. Everything from transfection to screening to clonal verification will be designed, executed, and analyzed from a single pane of glass: Monomer.
In the long term, we envision Monomer as the unified platform for automated biotechnology research. Lab hardware from any vendor will integrate with Monomer out of the box, putting automation within reach of any biologist. Scientists will have access to a suite of sophisticated machine learning algorithms, including ones we’ll build in-house and others built by third parties. The only limit will be what you can imagine.
Monomer is ready to empower scientists to pursue innovation while protecting their time. The future of biology will be deliberately designed, systematically constructed, and iteratively improved, all on Monomer. The operating system for biotechnology research has arrived.
Ready to build with Monomer? Schedule a product demo today.
