This Secretive Startup Is Revolutionizing Scientific Research

As a frustrated biomedical engineering student, Max Hodak came up with one idea that could "shake up science" itself. His idea was simple but ambitious: to revolutionize the way basic science research is done by making it cheaper, faster and more accessible. To Hodak, this means bypassing the drudgery of repetitive lab work and letting scientists focus on the intellectual work behind scientific discoveries. This idea culminated into the Google Ventures-backed, $14-million-funded "robotics cloud laboratory" Transcriptic, whose warehouse in Menlo Park, California houses robots that perform life sciences experiments. The startup promises to bring "your lab to the cloud", and scientists who want to test their research but hope to spend less time on repetitive testing can pay Transcriptic to perform their experiments for them. THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENCE So why are scientists excited about this? "When I was doing my PhD, most of it was lab work - six months into it, I knew I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in a lab," confessed Yvonne Linney, who has a PhD in Genetics and serves as Transcriptic's COO. "It was boring, frustrating, sometimes it was routine - often it wouldn't work. You spend all this time troubleshooting - it was very, very inefficient," Those of us who do not spend our days tinkering with test tubes in the lab might be tempted to think that Linney's problem does not apply to us. However, the fact that leaders in academia and pharmaceutical corporati...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news