

Benchling (YC S12) – The Digital Laboratory Notebook for Life Sciences - sajithw
http://a16z.com/2015/04/15/benchling/

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dzhu
Benchling's awesome - definitely a well-designed (and much needed!) tool for
biologists. They've done a great job with adding new features, from CRISPR
design to gel analysis, and their latest electronic lab notebook update is a
compelling step towards becoming the central hub for designing, storing and
sharing experiments and data.

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ernestipark
I know nothing about life sciences, but from talking to friends it seems like
this is one of those no brainer ideas.

I'm curious to know what some of the adoption/market challenges are - is it
hard to get scientists/students to actually use something like this? Why
hasn't anyone built this yet? Are there certain technical challenges that
haven't yet been addressed?

Congrats to a great team!

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sajithw
It is tough - it's a big behavior change to go from paper to electronic
records. It's less difficult when scientists are using wikis or Evernote
though.

It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's
never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists
use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data
silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and
associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one
location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.

It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up
with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for
manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by
themselves.

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sajithw
Founder here. We are hiring if you want to help us fix life science! No
biology background necessary, only an interest.

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actualdc1
Are there any ways to get involved as a medical student/physician scientist in
the making?

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jayzee
I have spoken to a few of their customers and the benchling team has built a
beautiful and uniquely useful product for life-scientists. Congrats on the
progress and success!

