#Transcriptic robotize full
#Transcriptic robotize series

For the full year and a half I was there, a dinosaur of a pipetting machine sat lonely, sprawling lazily across an entire workbench, collecting cobwebs, and wondering if anyone loved it. Transcriptic witnessed “wealthy labs buying $200,000 robots that would sit idle on the bench after six months of use because they were too complex for regular use.” I know this is true because it happened in my lab at Berkeley. What’s new is the idea that you don’t need to physically own these machines, and in fact, that is a more preferable setup to many. In fact, both my former and current lab flirted with the idea of acquiring such a robotic pipetting servant, but found the reality to be less than ideal. The idea of using liquid handling robots is not new.

All the coffee with none of the grunt work: a graduate student’s dream.The idea behind Transcriptic is simple: create a purely robotic laboratory that biological researchers can control remotely. With the creation of Transcriptic he envisioned a world where, “two postdocs with a laptop in a coffee shop run a drug company” without ever pipetting so much as a picoliter. More accurately: there wasn’t any other option, until Transcriptic.Unlike me, who had abjectly surrendered long ago to the tyranny of the pipette and it's accursed cousin, the 96-well plate, Max Hodak thought to address this problem head-on. But for synthetic biologists there really isn’t any other option. If a person were to casually observe my day to day activities in lab, they would surely conclude moving small amounts of liquid was my primary objective: a job a chimpanzee wouldn’t do for all the juice in Costco.Like many people in my position, I can’t help but feel a bit overqualified to function as little more than an arm connected to the three neurons it takes to coordinate the myriad functions of a pipette: up, down, and eject. It’s funny because it’s true.Now a third year PhD student and a seasoned veteran of synthetic biology lab work, I’m well versed in the reality of that statement.

However, fast forward several years later to the 2014 SynBioBeta Conference when Max Hodak, CEO of Transcriptic, poignantly stated: “People spend 15 years in school to end up moving small volumes of liquid around,” the joke finally hit me. Allow me to explain.When I was still an undergraduate researcher at Berkeley, a sixth-year PhD candidate once described his job as “moving small amounts of liquid around, in an attempt to add to the growing body of synthetic biology literature.” I didn’t get the joke at first I just thought he was being self-deprecating. While I can’t say the ride has been without bumps, I believe Transcriptic is headed in the right direction. It has merely set the company up with a massive amount of potential to revolutionize the way in which biological scientists conduct research.As a customer of Transcriptic from their very early stages, I can attest to the speed at which they are adjusting and evolving to best meet the needs of their clients. As Transcriptic’s blog is apt to point out this influx of money is not the success in itself.

#Transcriptic robotize series

Transcriptic, a cloud-based, robot-operated laboratory, recently raised $8.5 million in Series A funding, bringing total investments to just over $14 million in addition to a partnership with Y Combinator.