How Digital Experiment Platforms can Speed-Up Drug Discovery: Markus Gershater, Synthace

“Biology is the most complex system in the known universe.” says Markus Gershater, Chief Scientific Officer and Cofounder, Synthace. “The fundamental problem we’re trying to solve is to how to experiment with something as complex as biology.“

In a recent survey conducted by the digital experimentation platform, 87% of scientists said their greatest challenge “keeping track of all the different elements involved” with experimentation.

Listen to the full interview here:

Synthace’s mission is to help scientists to navigate and unpick complexity, helping them to understand what’s going on with their experiments and ultimately discover better therapeutics and biological solutions.

Originally starting out as a biology company themselves, they began to build their own software to help them plan, run and analyse sophisticated, high dimensional experiments.

“Biology is massively interconnected. It’s often those interconnections which lie at the heart of trying to understand a particular biological system. High dimensional experimentation is dramatically more powerful than conventional experiments as it allows us unpick the interconnections to analyse and optimise that complexity. “

Now a software company that is offering a ‘Digital Experiment Platform’ to the market, customers such as AstraZeneca use the platform “do the heavy lifting”. Scientists now rely digital tools and automation to do a lot of what they were having to record manually.

This can have a real impact on accelerating the it takes to develop new drugs. Markus shares that timelines for developing a new assay can be reduced from 9 months to between 30-70%.

“There’s evidence that you actually end up with a high quality assay because in testing thousands of parameters, you have comprehensively investigated that whole space with very powerful experiments.”

Lab automation & experimentation in life science R&D

Key findings from Synthace’s state of the industry report are below, based on a survey of 250 scientists working in life science R&D . Download the full report here.