Concept: California’s biotechnology research startup LatchBio has introduced an end-to-end bioinformatics platform for handling big biotech data to accelerate scientific discovery. It allows biologists to organize data and run processes, bioinformaticians to upload new workflows, and computational biologists to do downstream analysis.
Nature of Disruption: The LatchBio platform is a streamlined web-based solution intended to help biotech researchers overcome delays created by large data generated by research works. Researchers can easily import files from existing data stacks and access dozens of prominent bioinformatics pipelines and data visualization tools, like CRISPResso2, RNA-Seq, and AlphaFold, using any browser. When bioinformaticians use the LatchBio SDK (software development toolkit) to upload processes. It then develops no-code interfaces for biologists, enabling them to integrate, process, and visualize data in one place. The platform allows users to save and analyze experiment data at any scale utilizing serverless data architecture, minimizing the time and resources needed to go from experiment to insight in half. Moreover, it allows users to quickly create versioned, containerized, and reproducible bioinformatics workflows in any language.
Outlook: Today’s modern research studies create huge data, but many biologists lack the computational tools they need to quickly assess and iterate on their findings. LatchBio intends to build the infrastructure needed to accelerate the pace of discovery and translational research, allowing more life-saving treatments to reach the clinic faster. With their preferred development environments and version control systems, biotech teams can have complete control over workflow code. It enables them to specify the computation and storage they require in a single line of code, rather than spending hours configuring cloud services. In June 2022, LatchBio raised $28 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Coatue and Lux Capital to expand and develop the company’s web-based data processing platform.
The Integrated Platform for Bioinformatics
Scientific discovery is bottlenecked by the fragmentation of tooling across biology and bioinformatics teams. We built a harmonized bioinformatics platform between wet lab and dry lab in the cloud to help teams accelerate their R&D.
Latch.bio
About Latch Bio
Founded in 2021, Latch Bio is on a mission to build and disseminate the data infrastructure for the biocomputing revolution. The company’s cloud-based platform offers no-code bioinformatics for CRISPR researchers seeking to store, transform and visualize their data. Through any web browser, the global CRISPR community can quickly access popular bioinformatics pipelines and data visualization tools. The company’s investors include Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Haystack, and Fifty Years. Latch Bio is based in San Francisco, California and can be found online at www.LatchBio.com.
