Level: Beginner
Job Function: Analyst / Scientist / Engineer
Steven Brown, Bioprocess Scientist, Synthace
Michael Sadowski, Head of Bioinformatics, Synthace
Biology is complex. There is a necessity to embrace this complexity and adopt ways of working that focus on iteratively understanding dynamic and multifactorial "biological parameter landscapes," particularly for the development of therapeutics. Biopharmaceutical companies are now moving into advanced cell therapies, often produced on a per-patient basis with a requirement to manufacture a clinically valid product from variable donor material. Both the rewards and risks of such advanced cell therapies are great. We at Synthace have introduced Computer Aided Biology as a conceptual framework and an emerging ecosystem of digital-to-physical research tools that allows biological researchers to approach experiments of increasing complexity in a higher throughput, non-reductionist and iterative manner. Researchers at Synthace use the JMP DOE platform to rationally design and evaluate experiments. Experimental designs are interpreted by our own software (Antha) into low-level liquid handling instructions that are device-agnostic, yielding protocols that can easily be reproduced and shared across teams. Moreover, Antha optimizes protocols by identifying commonalities to be transferred and can specify constraints such as order of transfer. The combination of these tools allows us to increase the factor space in our experiments and gain knowledge about dynamic and multifactorial "biological parameter landscapes."