As the costs of DNA sequencing and synthesis drop precipitously, a host of computer science-meets-biotech startups are cropping up in Silicon Valley.
TeselaGen, which makes middleware for biotech labs that want to quickly design and iterate on new DNA constructs, is building tools that will help researchers set up and manage wetware experiments and interpret data from lab equipment. They and other startups like Genome Compiler, Transcriptic and SV Angel-backed Benchling are trying to make biotech software more elegant and speed up the development process.
“Our vision is about closing the design-build-test-and-evolve loop,” said CEO Mike Fero, who was a researcher at Stanford focusing on protein localization and who was previously a vice president at a computational genomics company called Neomorphics that was sold to Affymetrix in 2000. “We want to shorten the time frame it takes to get your DNA built and run more experiments.”
Featured image: “Industrial Building – Silicon Valley” by Jitze Couperus is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.