Benchling Builds Digital Data Foundation Powering Sanofi AI-Driven R&D

30+ global teams and 1,500 scientists at Sanofi use Benchling for scientific data, collaboration, and insights. 

Biopharma companies are taking a long-term view on how to adapt their R&D processes, technologies, and teams to reap the benefits of AI. Benchling’s work with Sanofi is a prime example of this, demonstrating the critical role that technology plays in delivering on AI ambition.  

Benchling worked with Sanofi to transition from legacy R&D systems to a digital data platform. More than 1,500 scientists across 30 global teams now use Benchling to collaborate, capture research data, and get insights, with teams including early discovery-omics such as precision oncology, core therapeutic pipeline teams including novel modalities like mRNA, all the way up the lifecycle to translational teams. 

Emma Labrot McIntosh, mRNA Data Analytics Application Lead for Data Science at Sanofi mRNA Center of Excellence, relies on Benchling and reiterates the importance of Benchling as her team’s starting point for machine learning (ML).

“My big focus has always been the data — garbage in, garbage out. Your models are only as robust as your data sets can be. The ML teams can’t do anything for you if your data set that you have key questions on is sitting in an excel sheet on someone’s desktop,” said Labrot McIntosh. “Everyone is starting to truly understand how important their work is beyond just getting the results you were hoping for in your experiment.”

Benchling aggregates complex data across departments at Sanofi, so teammates can easily collaborate, perform analyses, and make better decisions. This real-time visibility into standardized data gives Sanofi high-quality inputs to gain new insights faster. 

“Our codon optimized sequences get popped right into Benchling, and that's step one of the mRNA process. Those sequences are registered in Benchling, the plasmid development teams then know they have something to work with, and experiments happen, and science happens,” said Labrot McIntosh. “For me, that's really where it starts. It's understanding how this data is meant to be leveraged.”

As a result of Sanofi’s digital and AI leadership, R&D teams can scale and accelerate groundbreaking research processes in just hours instead of weeks. Adopting Benchling has been an integral process to enabling Sanofi's AI-powered R&D ambition. 

“Sanofi is paving the way for a new era of biotechnology, where every stage of R&D is faster, smarter, and more automated,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, CEO and co-founder Benchling. “Sanofi’s adoption of Benchling unlocks their ability to harness AI. With our R&D Cloud, Sanofi scientists can do their best work and accelerate timelines for life-changing medicines."