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Benchling launches bioregistration and inventory management system to enable accelerated biologics R&D
Software estimated to increase research productivity by upwards of 30% through automatic data gathering and integrated full suite of molecular biology tools
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 15, 2016 — Benchling, the next-generation life science R&D software company, today announced the launch of its Bioregistry system, releasing groundbreaking capabilities for complex biological entity registration and strain management. The Bioregistry is a major addition to Benchling's cloud lab informatics platform and is integrated seamlessly with Benchling's native lab notebook and molecular biology tools.
Benchling has become a leading innovator in the R&D technology space. The company provides an integrated software platform consisting of lab notebook and molecular biology tools, with limited-rollout LIMS functionality, to over 40,000 scientists globally.
The Benchling Bioregistry extends beyond the scope of similar registration software through its flexibility for inventory complexity, automatic data gathering through Benchling's lab notebook and molecular biology tools, and integrations with its upcoming LIMS product. Benching's Bioregistry is the first software of its kind that's flexible enough to support the complex relationships of any biological entities. It can accommodate the complete hierarchy of antibody discovery workflows, encompassing antibody complexes, protein chains, and plasmids that encode those protein chains. Constraints can be easily configured to validate uniqueness at each level of this hierarchy and enforce biological validity, such as ensuring protein chains are proper translations of plasmid regions.
"At Benchling, we say that cutting-edge science deserves cutting-edge software. In a field where progress is the bottom line, it's never enough to just measure up to the status quo," said Sajith Wickramasekara, Founder & CEO of Benchling. "With the Bioregistry, we're redefining biological entity registration by natively integrating it into our existing technology."
Through integration with Benchling's lab notebook, the Bioregistry can create bidirectional links between notebook entries and registered entities. Users can view all entries where a particular entity was mentioned, and all entities mentioned in a particular entry. The Bioregistry is also the first registration system that's natively integrated from the ground up with a full suite of molecular biology tools. Through this integration, the Bioregistry can register any plasmid file, automatically parse it out into its parts, and register those as well, with those registered parts being automatically linked to the original registered plasmid. And by combining registered parts, scientists can create wholly new constructs. The company estimates these automation features will increase research productivity by upwards of 30%.
Through integration with Benchling's in-development LIMS, the Bioregistry allows for sample tracking and lineage tracing for physical samples in the lab. Although Benchling's LIMS is in limited rollout, the LIMS and Bioregistry work together to automatically parse results from notebook entries and append them to registered entities.
Benchling developed their Bioregistry hand-in-hand with several of their customers, most prominently Agenus. "In my mind, the Bioregistry is the master of all of the data and information systems at Agenus or any company," said Dennis Underwood, Vice President of Molecular Information Systems at Agenus. "I've built these systems before for other companies, and it's always essential to have something like this in a diverse data environment. It's an environment that's very difficult to integrate data across, but Benchling gives us access to it."