The post Ginkgo Bioworks Taps Transcriptic’s Robotics Software appeared first on Digital Science.

As part of our thought leadership webinar series, our latest broadcast discussed How the Internet of Things is Disrupting Science.

We covered a diverse range of topics including:

• What the Internet of Things (IoT) is and why it’s useful to know
• Why the IoT is foundational for science’s full potential
• What the key challenges are facing industry
• Predecessors to IoT and current technology approaches
• IoT case studies from Transcriptic and TetraScience – lab tools leading the way

Our panel included:

• Umesh Katpally, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
• Alok Tayi, CEO and Co-founder, TetraScience
• Yvonne Linney, CEO, Transcriptic
• Laura Wheeler, Head of Digital Communications & Community Engagement, Digital Science

The first speaker to present, Umesh Katpally, began by giving a succinct description of the Internet of Things (IoT): A network of devices that capture and transmit data to people, software, and each other.

For people unfamiliar with IoT, a relatable example is a household connected by a string of electronic devices that are controlled by a central device like a smartphone. In the consumer market, products like Alexa are transforming households around the world by allowing users to control their homes using their voice. Umesh invited listeners to imagine a professional laboratory being controlled in the same way.

“Some of the key challenges the pharmaceutical and the bio pharmaceutical industries are facing today is the rising cost of medicines. This one challenge speaks to many underlying root causes. Rising costs of medicine include the cost of bringing medicines to market which on average totals upwards of two billion dollars.”

https://twitter.com/transcriptic/status/900736315460800513

Umesh then went on to comment on the key challenges in research.

.@katpally_umesh starts our #DSwebinar by going through #IoT and all its benefits. He also focuses on challenges researchers face pic.twitter.com/VKRNfXgez2

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) August 24, 2017

“Most of the time in a typical lab, your instruments don’t speak to each other. What ultimately happens is that scientists spend a lot of time on data management. On average, one hour of experimentation is almost equal to one hour of data management!”

Umesh then talked about a well-known problem in the lab – reproducibility of data. Surprisingly enough, 50% of results published are not reproducible. This costs the US about $28 billion a year. Umesh made an important reference to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and commented that having quality data can ensure AI and Machine learning can really thrive. Novartis is exploring a number of tools to better this process and prevent data silos. Umesh ended his presentation by talking through the business value IoT can provide companies and laboratories.

Speaking next was Alok Tayi, CEO and Co-founder of TetraScience. Alok started by stating the problems facing the bio-pharma industries. Large sums of money are being invested in Research & Development, yet ROI is poor. What’s more, R&D returns are consistently declining.

“Just last year about $80 billion was spent on global pharmaceutical R&D, yet only 22 new medicines came to market! This is the context in which we are looking to make an impact. From our experience as a team, what we’ve seen across the industry is that one of the fundamental underpinnings of the challenge is that there exists an ecosystem inside the laboratory.”

Unfortunately, a labs component parts don’t communicate well with each other.

.@aloktayi "There exists an ecosystem in the laboratory" How can you connect these systems? #DSwebinar pic.twitter.com/laV2jGig3T

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) August 24, 2017

Alok then made an important series of observations. Within a working laboratory, multiple scientists are required to manage data in a number of different formats – from paper notebooks to USBs, data still needs manual management. This requires time and energy and leads to a number of data silos which creates a myriad of problems.

Data in silos and not integrated, which leads to human error & wasted time in labs #DSwebinar

— Janice Kung (@janicekung) August 24, 2017

On a more practical level, individuals also face the daily problems of running lab equipment.

The Internet of Things helps users connect to devices and data entry points.

“The Internet of Things really creates value when one combines the connectivity with a workflow innovation and a business model that is relevant to the end user.”

TetraScience delivers value in three core areas: Project execution, enterprise data and the scientific method.

Alok then gave a summary of how TetraScience have tailored IoT for science by connecting instruments with a cloud based data collection control point – all controllable through real time dashboards on your computer.

.@aloktayi #DSwebinar #IoT @TetraScience benefits a number of areas within business and the lab pic.twitter.com/JMSD7lqODU

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) August 24, 2017

Next, Yvonne Linney, CEO of Transcriptic, delved into the ways in which Transcriptic is utilizing the IoT to create state of the art robotic laboratories that can be controlled digitally through the cloud.

“IoT enables a closed loop experimentation system where parameters can be continuously optimized based on the analysis data from previous rounds of experimentation. It’s critical to really develop the advances in experimental design.”

#DSwebinar @transcriptic has built one of the most futuristic bioscreening labs using IoT technologies pic.twitter.com/qS7WuG2yUr

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) August 24, 2017

Yvonne then explained how Transcriptic’s robotic work cells operate and mentioned the many other functions of Transcriptic, running through the ways in which data produced by their labs is processed, removing human ambiguity in the interpretation of common lab protocols which is key to reproducibility and consistency in running experiments.

https://twitter.com/transcriptic/status/900743630922563584

After listing the key issues that Transcriptic solves, Yvonne commented on Transcriptic’s vision for IoT, which is turning biology into an information technology. This will advance scientific research by driving down costs and facilitating collaboration and data sharing.

The webinar ended with a lively Q&A debate spearheaded by Laura Wheeler where insightful questions invoked great responses! If you would like to share your opinions about topics mentioned in the webinar, voice them using #DSwebinar. Follow @digitalsci for future webinars, podcasts and much more.

#DSwebinar #IoT @aloktayi KEY CHALLENGE – how do we get groups involved in labs to work together to create an Ecosystem of instrumentation

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) August 24, 2017

The post Webinar Summary: How the Internet of Things is Disrupting Science appeared first on Digital Science.

Tune into our latest thought leadership webinar, “How the Internet of Things is Disrupting Science” on Thursday 24th August at 4pm UK / 11am EST / 8am PST.

In this webinar, we will look at how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing and driving digital transformation in science, what tools are on offer and what the future landscape will look like.

You’ll learn about:

• What the Internet of Things (IoT) is and why it’s useful to know!
• Why the IoT is foundational for science’s full potential
• What the key challenges are facing industry
• Predecessors to IoT and current technology approaches
• IoT case studies from Transcriptic and TetraScience – lab tools leading the way

REGISTER NOW

Top thought leaders speaking on the webinar:

Umesh Katpally, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, an R&D arm of Novartis

Umesh is interested in enabling better and more efficient research with the use of new and evolving technologies such as IoT. He is currently working with a team to develop a long term strategy for Lab Informatics and automation, focused on making all research data machine learnable. The aim is to help with integrating and mining data sets from various stages of the drug development pipeline.

Yvonne Linney, CEO, Transcriptic

Prior to joining Transcriptic two years ago, Yvonne was an executive at industry-leading companies in the life sciences and diagnostics industries. She was a key member of the senior leadership team at Agilent Technologies where she was a VP General Management in the Life Science Group. She also collaborated with the founding members of the Human Genome Project during her time with Amersham International (now GE Healthcare). Yvonne holds a BS in Microbiology and Virology from Warwick University, UK, and a PhD in Genetics from Leicester University, UK.

Alok Tayi, CEO and Co-founder, TetraScience

Prior to TetraScience, Alok was a post-doctoral fellow in George Whitesides Lab at Harvard University. He also co-founded the open innovation platform, PreScouter. Alok has 15 years of research experience and has published numerous high-impact papers in journals like Nature and Nature Chemistry. He completed his B.S. and PhD in Materials Science at Cornell University and Northwestern University, respectively.

Host: Laura Wheeler, Digital Science
Laura Wheeler is the Head of Digital Communications for Digital Science. Having studied Biochemistry, Laura left the lab for communication roles at the BBC and at Nature Publishing Group and now heads up digital comms at Digital Science where she is always busy helping to build and deliver content to communities in the science space.

The post Digital Science Webinar: How the Internet of Things is Disrupting Science appeared first on Digital Science.

During the turmoil of 2016 Digital Science made a decision as to what type of business we wanted to be in the future. The decision was in no way out of step with who we were or who we always wanted to be, but 2016 seemed to make it all the more important to say it and to ensure that it is known. We not only want to be a business that grows and gives back to the broad research community from which it came, but we also want to embody the culture of our colleagues in research. Digital Science is  a place where anyone can work, regardless of their country of origin, regardless of their gender, faith, sexuality or any other appropriate diversity criteria. Lots of companies have such things written in their company handbook, but embracing these ideas and really making them part of the DNA of the business is another thing. It means finding innovative solutions to tough problems around hiring; it means committing to visa applications and to supporting people who want to move to work with other talented people; it means reviewing policies that have stood for a number of years and really looking hard to see if there is a way to make some things fairer.

In 2016, Digital Science turned six years old, but I hope that we also reached a different level of maturity as a company. It’s difficult to describe Digital Science as a startup anymore but from the energy of staff in the company, the will to do things professionally yet pragmatically and cleverly, the belief in our mission to improve the experience of researchers in their work, it is difficult to see how we’ve fundamentally changed from the startup that we were six years ago. I think that the main change I’ve seen is that we feel an even greater responsibility than ever “to do the right thing”. It’s difficult to put into words what that really means, but improving our professional services at the centre of Digital Science is important; ensuring that when any of the portfolio companies releases a new version of their product, the attention to detail is staggering; the time spent working with clients to really understand their problems and the willingness of clients to spend time with our teams is gratifying.

Below, you’ll read about the fantastic year our portfolio companies have had. Here, I just wanted to mention a couple of successes within the broader Digital Science community. Digital Science completed investments into TetraScience and Transcriptic, two exciting new startups in the US, each of which is well placed to change the way that labs work in the future. We published four Digital Research Reports, collaborated with Figshare and Springer Nature on a report on the State of Open Data, released the Digital Research Yearbook at the Royal Society in October, produced a white paper on the “New Research Data Mechanics” and worked with the UArctic collaboration to show how much work is being done on “Arctic Science”.

As we look forward to 2017, the amount of exciting and innovative projects just seems to multiply (perhaps slightly alarmingly to those on the team here at Digital Science)…

The Digital Science team wishes you all the best for 2017…keep watching this space!

Highlights from our portfolio

Altmetric

2016 was a big year for Altmetric with lots of new partnerships, projects and announcements! The year started with Summon discovery service adding Altmetric badges to their database. NISO announced the new Data Quality Code of Conduct for altmetrics in February which both Euan and Jean had a hand in putting together. Our first partnership of the year came in March with IEEE adding Altmetric badges into their Xplore Digital Library. We announced the very first Altmetric Research Grant in March which was awarded to Dr Lauren Cadwallader, Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge, in June. Our first major update to our functionality came in April when Altmetric data for Books was added to the Explorer. Later that month we partnered with Figshare giving users the ability to see Altmetric data on their database. Our summer began with the launch of our next big functionality update: the inclusion of Scopus Citations to details pages in the Altmetric Explorer. In July we had two more major integrations with the announcement that Profiles RNS and ÜberResearch added Altmetric badges to their databases. In September we added Syllbus data from the Open Syllabus Project to the Explorer showing where individual books had been included in Syllabi in over 4,000 institutions worldwide. Our biggest milestone of the year was the release of Version 2 of the Explorer for Institutions in September which features a completely revamped user experience including new visualisations, reporting and searching features. Our last big partnerships of the year were with Pubmed Central and IOP Publishing, both integrating Altmetric data. As always we finished the year with our Top 100 list of the most discussed research of the year with none other than President Barack Obama at the top spot!

BioRAFT

With over 160,000 safety training courses delivered to scientists worldwide through BioRAFT, 2016 was a great year for safety and for the BioRAFT team. In addition to adding new life sciences, higher education, and medical device customers, BioRAFT kept its ongoing promise to the community to continually improve its suite of software and services. We released major enhancements to our IBC Biological Registration, Inspection, and Equipment Modules, and implemented powerful new dashboards that provide real-time, actionable data for EHS and for leadership across our customers’ organizations. BioRAFT also continued to be a major supporter of the EHS community through our thought leadership series and sponsorship of industry events: we hosted major educational webinars including one on The New View, a methodology for building safety conscious organizations, and attended 21 conferences/symposia. Of course, this all was accomplished by our amazing team, which increased by fifty percent in 2016, working closely in collaboration with our passionate and dedicated customers. We can’t wait to see what we will accomplish together in 2017!

Figshare

Whilst 2016 was not everyone’s favourite year, from our point of view it was the most successful across a variety of measures. We now have over 3 million public articles, with 26 million page views, 7.5 million downloads and over 10 thousand citations. This year was spent building some great new features including Collections, Public Projects, Altmetric & Github integration, curation workflows, reporting and statistic dashboards, new file viewers and a number of search and discovery enhancements. We announced over 20 new partnerships with institutions and publishers including Amsterdam University, Royal Society Publishing, Springer Nature and Carnegie Mellon University, to name a few. Understanding the importance of working with the research community, we attended and spoke at conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. We also expanded our community conference figshare fest, holding four events around the world – many more to come in 2017. In partnership with Digital Science and Springer Nature we published the first, “State of Open Data report” featuring the results of a survey of over 2,000 researchers on their attitude to data publishing featuring contributions from thought leaders all over the world. We look forward to an even better 2017!

GRID

During the first year we released the GRID database to the public, we added over 17,000 new records through manual curation, three new external identifiers to make it easier to link out to other datasets, and released our own RDF version of GRID for download to help out our linked data enthusiasts. We have already planned a host of exciting new improvements for the upcoming year. We are looking into increasing coverage of our current external identifiers, especially Wikidata IDs, as well as including some new ones to our already comprehensive coverage. Most importantly, we decided to further support the open data community in 2017 by making changes to the GRID license and going CC0, making it even easier to use in conjunction with other open datasets and software.

Labguru

This year at Labguru we have diversified functionality with our clients and partners, including an improved Samples table for experiments. Large institutions continue to adopt Labguru, as well as a number of academic research institutions, biotech companies and government labs across the US, the Netherlands, France and Australia. The Labguru team will be out on a number of road trips in 2017 so do look out for us.

Overleaf

2016, Wow!  What a year full of growth and excitement at Overleaf. We’re happy to share that as of the end of 2016, Overleaf has over 500,000 registered users, and over 6,000,000 documents have been created using Overleaf. That’s a lot of work and brain-power! We have 175 advisors promoting and supporting Overleaf around the world; over 20 institutional partnerships – and more to announce in early 2017; and over 20 publishing partnerships – which includes hundreds of journal authoring templates and simplified, 1-click submission links. Our authors can now write, collaborate, and submit to a number of journals with 1 click, directly from Overleaf! We have happily posted 64 blog articles; reached 33,398 Twitter followers and tweeted 1,265 nuggets of gold! We thank all of our incredible users and supporters – and we’re fired up to continue the incredible fun and momentum in 2017!

ReadCube

As 2016 winds down – we wanted to take this opportunity to send our most sincere thanks to all of our users, partners, collaborators, and colleagues for being part of the ReadCube & Papers family. This year, we surpassed all of our goals, and we could not have done it without your support. While there were many special moments this year – here are some of our favorites…

• Over 40 million people used ReadCube and Papers technology to read, discover and manage their literature in 2016! That is almost three times as much since last year!
• 219 million articles were read in ReadCube this year! That’s over 611,000 each day!
• Our readers spent over 1534 years’ worth of time reading in ReadCube in 2016 which is almost 4.4 years reading each day!
• Over 52 million articles are now available as Enhanced PDFs within ReadCube’s web, desktop and mobile applications.
• We have partnered with another 15 publishers and industry partners for a total of over 85 to date! New partners this year include: HighWire Press, Ingenta Connect, Taylor & Francis, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, The Geological Society of London, The Electrochemical Society and Liverpool University Press.

You can check out all the highlights in our end of year rundown via http://rdcu.be/n7jV and stay tuned for updates on all the exciting projects planned for the upcoming year via @readcube

Symplectic

Symplectic has had an exciting year in which we turned 13 years old! Our team managed three successful conferences, in Cambridge (UK), Melbourne, and Duke (Durham, NC). Elements v5.0 was released to rapturous critical acclaim, with a new UI and Assessment Module. We launched a new hosting service, with uptake from institutions around the world, and released a popular open-source ‘Bootstrapped’ VIVO theme at the VIVO conference in Denver. Symplectic now have clients in 2/3 of the THE World Top 25 Universities!

TetraScience

2016 has wildly exceeded TetraScience’s expectations. Our customer base has grown 5x, network 6x, and revenue 10x. One of our main highlights was launching a new product, TetraScience Utilization, further delivering on our vision to provide a deep and dynamic mission control for R&D labs. These accomplishments are directly attributed to the hard work of our phenomenal team. With loftier ambitions in 2017, we hope to add 10 members to our team in Q1 alone across multiple functions (engineering, marketing, operations, and sales).

ÜberResearch

The third year of operations for ÜberResearch saw lots of exciting developments, in several different directions. The Dimensions database brought in many new sources, bringing the new total to over 3.4 million projects from 250 funders, and more than $1 Trillion of funding! The addition of new funding sources will continue into 2017 and beyond, and forms the backbone for not just Dimensions for Funders, but also the recently launched Dimensions for Publishers, as well as a new Dimensions interface for researchers coming in early 2017. 2016 also saw the integration of the Altmetric attention score into Dimensions for clients who use both platforms – bringing an extra splash of colour to the publications data in Dimensions with the Altmetric donuts!

The post 2016: A Year of Global Investments, Grants and Growth appeared first on Digital Science.

Today, we are very proud to reveal that we have invested in Transcriptic, a California-based robotic cloud laboratory for life sciences.

Transcriptic’s revolutionary, automated cellular and molecular biology platform enables scalable life science research with flexibility and precision. The convenient and simple web interface allows biologists to control their science and generate data from virtually anywhere in the world. In today’s increasingly digital research environment, where consistent data is essential and reproducibility of results a necessity, Transcriptic is redefining how research is delivered.

“The Transcriptic platform has freed researchers from many hours of painstaking, error-prone work and enabled them to focus where their time is most valuable. Our goal is to make life science research cheaper, faster, and more accessible, and today’s investment will enable us to deliver further innovations to make that a reality.”

“Since we founded Transcriptic in 2012, we have seen a significant change in how the industry thinks about lab work,” said founder and CEO Max Hodak. “The Transcriptic platform has freed researchers from many hours of painstaking, error-prone work and enabled them to focus where their time is most valuable. Our goal is to make life science research cheaper, faster, and more accessible, and today’s investment will enable us to deliver further innovations to make that a reality.”

Daniel Hook our CEO adds: “Our mission at Digital Science is to bring innovative tools to researchers that allow them to spend more time where they add most value, so Transcriptic is a perfect fit for us. In addition to sharing very similar goals, there is also significant potential for co-operation and integration with other products in our portfolio of companies, including Tetrascience, Labguru, BioRAFT and Figshare.”

We extend them a very warm welcome. Read Transcriptic’s own investment announcement here

You can follow Transcriptic on Twitter @transcriptic.

The post Digital Science Invests in Transcriptic, the Robotic Laboratory in the Cloud appeared first on Digital Science.