Benchling (YC S12) – The Digital Laboratory Notebook for Life Sciences | Hacker News Reader

Benchling (YC S12) – The Digital Laboratory Notebook for Life Sciences

a16z.com

32 pointssajithw8 comments

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.

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!

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.

Its easy to say. I'm 6 months into a stint at a university lab. I write the software that manages the databases for the experiments.

There is data eveywhere, managing it isn't easy, especially as it runs into the TB.

Still paper notebooks for our researchers. We have a group looking into the digital ones. There is some worry that using a provider means the data is out of your control. These notebooks are almost like legal documents, so they tread lightly when changing the format. Plus worry about lock in and expense.

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

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

What kind of roles are you hiring? Computational biologist here.. :-)

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com