Science is hard. Repeating other labs' findings is even harder.
That's particularly true in the life sciences, where biologists and
researchers manually run sophisticated experiments fraught with
variables such as water purity, humidity or subtle differences in
equipment.
"Biologists do almost everything by hand and
there's a lot of variation in experiments from lab to lab," said Ethan
Perlstein, founder and CEO of Perlstein Lab, a San Francisco-based
biotech startup working to discover drugs to fight rare genetic
diseases.
"I want to be able to do science in a way that's auditable and scalable, and the data is repeatable, pristine and good."
Emerald Therapeutics thinks its Emerald Cloud Lab, dubbed ECL-1, could
deliver just what Perlstein ordered. That's because ECL-1 lets
scientists remotely conduct more than 40 different standard experiment
types on $3 million worth of lab equipment, including DNA synthesizers,
mass spectrometers for separating and measuring the weight of charged
particles, and advanced microscopes. All similar equipment in the 15,000
square foot facility is perfectly identical, down to the type and
length of tubing and pipes. Automated robots perform the tests, removing
the human element from the equation.
Other startups offer similar science labs in the cloud. DNAnexus provides tools to store, manage and analyze the enormous amount of data generated by genome sequencing. Transcriptic
also touts its automated robotics and controlled lab environment, but
it handles fewer than 20 experiments, compared with ECL's 40.
In effect, Emerald and companies like it aim to become the biosciences
version of Amazon Web Services. Just as AWS pared the cost of
developing commercial software, labs in the cloud may change the
economics of life sciences exploration.
The average cost per experiment run by ECL-1, for example, is $25.
"We want to be the Amazon Prime of experiments, starting within 48
hours of the order," Brian Frezza, Emerald Therapeutics' co-founder and
co-CEO, said from the company's offices in South San Francisco, Calif.
Instead of leasing computer servers by the hour, as Amazon Web
Services does, Emerald and its rival startups rent out robots and
precisely calibrated instrumentation -- with the added benefit of
providing an auditable data trail.
"Having robots
handle experiments on exactly the same equipment, in exactly the same
environment, will always be superior to two pairs of hands," said
Perlstein,"It's just objectively better to have fully auditable and
automated experiments."
The ramifications could be enormous. Consider: In 2011, researchers at
German pharmaceutical giant Bayer HealthCare reported they could replicate only one-third of 67 key studies
published in top science journals. The next year Amgen's former head of
global cancer research told Nature magazine that his team failed to reproduce the findings of 47 out of 53 "landmark" studies
the pharmaceutical company wanted to use in its drug development work.
Variables in equipment and environment could have contributed to their
issues.
Having reproducible results isn't the only
potential boon from labs in the cloud. There's also a financial
advantage, since modern labs buy equipment costing anywhere from
$100,000 to $240,000 per piece, which they use for perhaps 10 percent of
their research.
"This sort of experiment as a service
is interesting because it helps avoid the huge setup costs of buying the
equipment as well as finding someone skilled enough to understand and
configure everything -- all before you can even run your first
experiment," said Frank Gillett, an analyst with Forrester Research.
"Now you can reduce the time it takes to complete the experiment and
reduce the cost of the experiment itself," said Gillett.
Stephen Wolfram, developer of Mathematica computational
software and the Wolfram programming language (and one of the youngest
recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship), sees an even bigger benefit:
labs like ECL-1 let scientists explore the biggest questions.
Wolfram calls it a "top down" vs. "bottom up" approach to scientific
discovery. A top-down approach, for example, lets researchers design
whatever experiments will "get at some larger truth about biology." In a
bottom-up approach, however, scientists decide what to explore based on
the resources they have at their disposal. While both are valid, the
top-down way of thinking leads to big discoveries faster. Wolfram is
also an adviser to Emerald Therapeutics.
With ECL-1,
scientists "can be running any experiment remotely within 24 hours, all
without having to invest months of time, dedicating large number of
staff members, and obtaining millions of dollars in fixed cost equipment
to bring these experiments online," Wolfram said in an emailed
statement.
"Life scientists can go back to a focus on
how to answer the largest remaining questions in chemistry and biology
rather then spend all of their time focused on becoming professional
fundraisers and managers of large organizations," Wolfram said.
Emerald expects to offer more than 100 experiments -- or 100 percent
of all life science tests -- within the next 18 months. "We won't
consider ourselves in full production until we offer 100 percent of all
the available lab tests," said DJ Kleinbaum, Emerald's other co-founder
and co-CEO. Best friends since grade school, Kleinbaum holds a PhD in
organic chemistry from Stanford University; Frezza earned his PhD in
chemical biology from The Scripps Research Institute. They founded
Emerald in 2010.
For his part, Perlstein is happy to
have access to ECL's available tests, conducted with robotic precision.
"This is the beginning of the transformation to replicable scientific
methods," said Perlstein. "Science isn't science until it's reproduced."
Monday, May 18, 2015
Science labs in the cloud: Champagne discoveries, beer budget
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Posted on: Monday, May 18, 2015
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