Miami is excelling in the AI-fueled biotech innovation space? At a first glance, that might not sound like the most obvious vertical for #MiamiTech to tackle. Refresh Miami has previously covered Exscientia, which is leveraging the latest in AI for drug discovery. But they’re not the only biotech innovators in town.
Meet TeselaGen. The startup, which recently joined the latest cohort of Endeavor Miami’s ScaleUp Program, has developed a software platform that enables biotech R&D professionals to do what they do faster and at scale.
The applications of TeselaGen’s platform are varied, running the gamut from agritech and protein design and manufacturing to vaccine development and gene therapy. For each of these use cases though, the value of TeselaGen is more or less the same: get where the teams want to go faster. A 10x reduction in development costs, 7x increase in design and build speeds, 2x increase in production rate.
Founder Eduardo Abeliuk has been working on TeselaGen since around 2011, after completing a PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Bioengineering – both from Stanford. The Chilean entrepreneur relocated to Miami two years ago after almost two decades in California.
“Back in high school, biology was definitely not my favorite subject,” Abeliuk admitted to Refresh Miami. “But more recently, I rediscovered it and realized that it had become very quantitative. There are a number of technologies that have been developed in the past 10 to 20 years that enable us to apply engineering principles to biology and to capture data and to understand how these biological systems work. And to optimize and make use of them.”
Through his PhD, he explored the worlds of computational and molecular biology in partnership with an interdisciplinary group that included biologists and chemists among others. It was during this work that he began to realize the need – and potential value for – artificial intelligence to improve processes in the world of biology. And so TeselaGen was born.
Abeliuk described their international team of around 20 as “lean and mean,” enabling the company to serve thousands of users across hundreds of institutions. Much of this customer base leverages TeselaGen’s free “community” version, but TeselaGen also sells startups and enterprises their tools through a SaaS business model. “We serve companies with as few as five employees to publicly-traded companies with thousands of employees,” he continued.
“Sometimes we like to call ourselves the ‘operating system for biotechnology’ because interoperability is the key value proposition of our platform,” Abeliuk noted. Through a variety of industry partnerships, TeselaGen is also beginning to integrate automation robots onto the platform. And there is much more product development to come.
Abeliuk shared TeselaGen’s ultimate goal of democratizing the access to advanced scientific algorithms and tools. “Within the next five years, we want every biologist to be using – or at least be aware of – TeselaGen.”
Original article by: Riley Kaminer @ Refresh Miami. Article: https://refreshmiami.com/teselagens-ai-powered-platform-enables-biotech-innovation-to-happen-faster-and-at-scale/