Announcing Benchling Bioprocess, the End-to-End Solution for Modern, High-throughput Process Development

SAN FRANCISCO, September 19, 2023 — Benchling announced Benchling Bioprocess, a cloud-native, end-to-end solution for modern, high-throughput process development today at Benchtalk, the company’s annual customer event. More than one hundred customers are already using Benchling products today for process development. Now, with Benchling Bioprocess, development teams will have access to new functionality including a visual recipe designer, guided batch execution, and pre-built instrument integrations, all with a modern, easy-to-use interface that promotes fast and accurate data collection. The impact for customers is accelerated process development cycles by harnessing data at scale, a simplified tech transfer with structured, traceable process design, and better data science via an open data platform. 

Process development teams face increased market pressure to move promising discoveries into manufacturable products. The pace of drug development has almost doubled in recent years as biopharma shifts towards new drug modalities, such as cell and gene therapies, RNA, and complex drug conjugates. Process science has evolved considerably to support these aims. But the software applications  for process teams remain a siloed array of rigid point solutions and internally-built systems that contribute to  disconnected data, poor user experience, and high cost of ownership. A recent survey of PD scientists* illustrates the tension with these legacy systems: PD scientists report spending 23% of their time searching for and structuring data for analysis. In this highly-manual environment, 87% of PD scientists cite data errors as an issue for their organization, with scientists spending 10% of their time redoing experiments and 19% of their time on tech transfer. Benchling Bioprocess delivers a unified solution that process development teams need in order to thrive in the modern era of biopharmaceutical development. Structured process data, supported by an ISA-88-compatible data model, feeds into data science and machine learning platforms, helping users gain new process insights. Bioprocess will be part of the Benchling R&D Cloud, providing customers with purpose-built solutions for both research and process development all on a unified platform.

“We work with process development teams at many of the world’s leading biopharma companies, and Benchling Bioprocess reflects the needs that we consistently hear from customers,” said Shawna Wolverton, Benchling Chief Product Officer. “We’re putting the process scientists, operators, IT teams, and data scientists at the center of our design, delivering them a unified solution that accelerates process development cycles with faster, higher throughput experimentation. With process development, speed, quality, and safety are all paramount and change is constant. That’s why we’re redoubling our focus on process development and delivering an innovative roadmap to help our customers stay prepared for what’s next.”

Benchling Bioprocess will include the following capabilities.   

• Recipe design - Create recipes using an intuitive, visual designer. Sequence the order of unit operations, connect material inputs and outputs, define process parameters, all using a drag-and-drop interface.  

• Experiment planning – Flexibly design experiments to develop the design space with variations across process parameters and materials.

• Batch execution - Quickly move recipe designs and experiments into guided batch execution, with instructions dynamically populated from the recipe definition. Run experiments in parallel, collect data at each process step, collaborate across teams, and track overall progress, while saving time by not having to configure batch instructions. 

• Process insights - Visualize process data with full experimental context and traceability within the platform. Move structured data from Bioprocess directly into 3rd party analysis tools using out-of-the-box connectors (e.g. JMP, Pluto, Watershed), and feed into data lakes and AI/ML pipelines using APIs. 

• Lab instrument connectivity - Natively connect, manage, and analyze high-throughput instrument and R&D data across an organization using Benchling Connect.

• Platform - Bioprocess is part of the Benchling R&D cloud, built on a unified platform allowing R&D teams and their IT partners to consolidate on a common technology stack with shared taxonomy, data structure, user provisioning, and data access.

Benchling Bioprocess will be available Spring 2024. To learn more and request a demo, customers can visit the Benchling Bioprocess web page.  

*Source: Blinded survey of process development professionals, conducted by third party research firm, 2023