Episode Summary

Imagine if every graphics design company built its own version of Photoshop in-house. That’s exactly what’s happening today in biology research. Ten-fold increases in data every two years are forcing every biology team to build out their own, in-house bioinformatics stack to store, clean, pipe, and manage the massive volumes of data generated by their experiments. All that work has to happen even before teams can analyze the results! Recognizing this obstacle to high-throughput biology research, Alfredo, Kenny and Kyle built LatchBio to bring the modern computing stack to biotech. By uniting wet lab experiments with dry lab processing, storage, and analyses, LatchBio is democratizing access to top-notch bioinformatics and empowering biologists to derive relevant insights from their data that can move our world forward. Tune in to learn more about their journey from Berkeley dropouts to entrepreneurs building no-code tools to power the biocomputing revolution.

About the Team

• Alfredo Andere, CEO, was born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico. He majored in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and minored in Math at UC Berkeley before dropping out to co-found LatchBio.
• Kyle Giffin, COO, attended UC Berkeley to study Cognitive Neuroscience and Data Science before dropping out to found LatchBio.
• Kenny Workman, CTO, started engaging in molecular biology research when he was 15, first at local community colleges as a lab hand and then at MIT and UC Berkeley over successive summers. Prior to co-founding LatchBio, he worked at Asimov and Serotiny as a Software and Machine Learning Engineer.

Key Takeaways 

• After hundreds of interviews with biotech leaders to discover pain points around managing data, the founders developed the LatchAI platform.
• Common biology analyses require piping gigabytes/terabytes of data, meaning data storage and retrieval require programming expertise.
• Although scientists may be experts in biological theory and wet lab experimentation, programming expertise is scarce. Biologists must rely on limited computational analysts to process and visualize their data; thus, access to bioinformaticians is a bottleneck in the scientific discovery process.
• On the flip side, bioinformaticians are often hampered by repetitive analysis tasks, preventing them from innovating new computational methods.
• Recognizing this disconnect between biologists and bioinformaticians, Alfredo, Kenny, and Kyle launched LatchBio: an end-to-end biocomputing platform to allow both wet lab and dry lab scientists to get back to what they’re trained to do - science!
• The team recently launched their SDK - a Python native developer toolkit - to bridge the divide between the computationally literate bioinformaticians and the no-code savvy biologists.
• The goal of Latch is to become the universal cloud computing platform for academic research and industry biotech.

Impact 

• The no-code platform that LatchBio is building is bringing the modern computing stack to biotech, streamlining data analysis so scientists can focus on solving the world’s biggest problems with biology.

Company: LatchBio