Meet the winners of the Changemaker Awards from Benchtalk London 2024

Earlier this month, we announced the inaugural winners of the Changemaker Awards at Benchtalk in Boston. With Benchtalk London comes a new crop of Changemaker winners, and another opportunity to recognize innovation and excellence. Here's a look at the 2024 London Changemaker Award winners!

Award: Benchling Champion

Winner: Stefani Giacopazzi, LIMS Administrator, Single Cell Discoveries  

Single Cell Discoveries is the leading single-cell sequencing CRO, providing high-impact insights to biopharmaceutical companies, health systems, and academic research centers globally. Located in the Netherlands, their team of scientists is dedicated to developing customized solutions at high quality and rapid speed. 

Why this award 

While Benchling may pride itself on being customer obsessed, our customers pride themselves on being Benchling obsessed. “I’ve been obsessed with the platform and the company since we implemented it back in January 2023. I eat, breathe, and sleep all things Benchling,” shares Stefani Giacopazzi. As Single Cell Discoveries’ Benchling guru, Stefani has earned the nickname "the Benchling Machine".

The majority of Stefani’s focus as a LIMS Adminsrator at Single Cell Discoveries is on developing new workflows, templates, and insights, as well as expanding and optimizing the data model as the company rapidly grows. With zero SQL knowledge prior to using Benchling, Stefani has quickly become an expert, writing new insights queries with ease on the platform. 

Award: Benchling Champion

Winner: Anne-Francoise Rorive, Digital R&D, Sanofi

Sanofi is driven by a single purpose: to chase the miracles of science to improve people’s lives. This ruthless prioritization and focus helps Sanofi to unlock and maximize the potential of key medicines, vaccines, and self-care solutions for people across the globe. 

Why this award 

Just like Sanofi, Anne-Francoise too has had a targeted focus: championing multiple large-scale, global deployments of Benchling across the entire company. Over the past 3+ years, this effort has spanned initiatives focused on standardizing the ELN, global sample management, Benchling's Validated Cloud, and In Vivo. With a deep understanding of Sanofi’s goals and strategic priorities, Anne-Francoise has driven alignment on how Benchling can be used to advance these objectives to impact real change. 

Award: Top Community Contributor 

Winner: Beata Dunne, Software Engineer, LabGenius 

Combining human and machine intelligence, LabGenius is accelerating the discovery of uniquely powerful antibodies. Pioneering the development of a smart robotic platform that’s capable of designing, conducting, and learning from its own experiments, the team is radically improving the drug discovery process, making the generation of advanced antibody therapeutics faster. 

Why this award 

For Beata Dunne, making sure that her LabGenius colleagues are proficient and happy with their use of Benchling is primary. Dedicating a large part of her role to achieving this goal, Beata runs a weekly drop-in session for the entire company, and is constantly updating teams on new skills and features to enable them in their work. Beata has worked diligently with both groups and individuals to review experiment templates and schemas, finding ways to improve efficiency and data integrity.

Maintaining all company documentation surrounding Benchling, she single-handedly enables users to find the information they need for optimal productivity. And, as an active member of the Benchling Community, Beata goes above and beyond in this duty, constantly seeking out answers and new ideas to maximize the benefits of the platform. 

Award: AI/ML Innovator

Winner: Cambrium 

Cambrium is building a sustainable future, one molecule at a time. Using a proprietary molecular design technology, Cambrium creates novel material building blocks with previously inaccessible functionalities, enabling innovators to create products that are better for people, and the planet.

Why this award 

With Benchling, Cambrium has moved towards a new, more reliable approach to data capture. With newfound instrument connectivity, all of the data generated in the lab goes through Benchling, serving as the primary way for pipelines to ingest lab data.

This ensures that the team can keep visibility into processes and data models, while preventing parallel data journeys from emerging. Benchling’s database also allows Cambrium to seamlessly plug in AI models with ease, making AI more accessible and less time intensive. As pioneers of AI/ML, Cambrium’s contribution to improving data capture has facilitated the development and application of more effective AI models, opening up endless possibilities for transformative change. 

Award: Human Impact Award 

Winner: Orchard Therapeutics

Orchard Therapeutics is carrying forward a rich history to change the future of medicine. Founded in 2015, Orchard’s roots are planted in some of the first research and clinical development involving hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) gene therapy. Playing a central role in the evolution of this technology, the team is continuing to make an impact by imagining new possibilities for those affected by severe genetic diseases.

Why this award 

Living up to its mission, Orchard Therapeutics announced earlier this year that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Lenmeldy™ (atidarsagene autotemcel) for children with early-onset metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). This milestone opens up tremendous new possibilities for children in the U.S. who previously did not have treatment options beyond supportive care. Based on data generated from the clinical development program, one-treatment of the new gene therapy, the potential to restore enzyme function to stop or slow disease progression has been shown effective, with up to 12 years of follow-up in the earliest treated children.

“As a mother who lost a child to MLD, it is difficult to articulate how much of a watershed moment this is for patients, families and advocates,” said Maria Kefalas, Ph.D., co-founder of the Calliope Joy Foundation and a founding member of Cure MLD. Here at Benchling, we celebrate the entire Orchard Therapeutics team for its remarkable contribution to the MLD community and beyond. 

Award: Changemakers of the Year 

Winner: R&D Data Management, Novonesis 

Novonesis means a “new beginning”. Staying true to these roots, the biosolutions company is offering a new beginning based on the power of biology. At a time where the world more than ever needs change, Novonesis is stepping up to make it, bringing transformative biosolutions to market across every industry. 

Why this award

The R&D Data Management team at Novonesis coordinated and delivered a global rollout of Benchling, successfully onboarding 1,3000 scientists onto the R&D cloud. In addition to establishing a global data model that is currently in use across the entire organization, the team is responsible for implementing transformative practices that have long-lasting impact.

With a detail oriented approach, unwavering commitment, and continuous improvement mindset, their relationship with the Benchling engagement team has been one underpinned by collaboration. Contributing insight to Benching’s Nordic Digital Science & Innovation Day over the past two years, as well as inputs for new Bencling solutions, Novonesis is bringing inspiration and innovation to both the scientific community and the technology supporting it.

Congratulations to this year’s winners 

Congratulations to all of our winners of London’s Changemaker Awards. Want to learn more about how you too can make change? Check out the inspiring stories of the 1,200+ biotechs building breakthroughs on Benchling.