Emerald Cloud Lab

Emerald Cloud Lab is a privately-owned biotech startup. The company is among the first to offer laboratory automation through the software as a service model. D.J. Kleinbaum and Brian Frezza founded Emerald Cloud Lab in 2010.[1]

Emerald Cloud Lab
Private
PredecessorEmerald Therapeutics
Founded2010 (2010)
Founder
  • D.J. Kleinbaum
  • Brian Frezza
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
United States
Websiteemeraldcloudlab.com

Products and Services

Emerald Cloud Lab provides automated laboratory tests and assays through a remote electronic lab notebook interface. This allows researchers to send research samples to ECL for standard analyses, to specify parameters for the experiments, and (in theory) to ensure reproducibility for future re-trials.[2] Research groups are also provided the ability to access and add their experiments to an ontology-indexed database of previous laboratory tests to see experiments similar to theirs.[3] Unlike some competing companies, ECL fully owns and operates the research infrastructure used to conduct experiments. Experiments are encoded in an language and grammar designed by Emerald Cloud Lab to allow remote operation and reproducibility.[4]

History

Founding

D.J. Kleinbaum and Brian Frezza grew up together on Emerald Drive, in the Philadelphia suburbs, and they long wanted to build a biotechnology business together. In 2010, after completing their PhDs, they came together to found Emerald Therapeutics in an effort to develop "antiviral therapy for diseases such as hepatitis and HIV". During this time, they experienced problems with laboratory hardware and software. Hardware often comes from disparate manufacturers, software is often rudimentary, and output can vary in formatting. To simplify laboratory testing, the group wrote centralized management software for the different machines and a database to store all metadata and results.[5] This "laboratory operating system" became Emerald Therapeutic's first product, launched in 2014 under the name Emerald Cloud Lab.[2]

Business development

As of 2014, Emerald Cloud Lab offered 40 types of laboratory tests, with intent to expand to over a hundred by the next year.[5] By 2017, the range of tests had expanded to 106 types.[6]

Researchers and pharmaceutical groups have long been concerned about the lack of reproducibility of laboratory testing in the biomedical field. A 2017 paper used Emerald Cloud Lab and a similar company, Transcriptic, to explore how robotic lab automation could ameliorate this problem. The paper concludes that, "we believe that robotic labs can provide the basis for performing a large percentage of basic biomedical research in a reproducible and transparent fashion".[7] Frezza has described this laboratory inconsistency as one specific reason for the development of Emerald Cloud Lab and the use of automation.[1]

Financing

The business got its second round of funding by 2014 from the Founders Fund (FF), a venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel, bringing total funding raised from FF up to $13.5 million.[5] The first FF funding round was not public.[2]

References
  1. Garner, Rochelle. "Science labs in the cloud: Champagne discoveries, beer budget". Cnet. Archived from the original on 28 October 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
  2. Temple, James (30 June 2014). "Founders Fund Backs a Robotic Lab that Puts Science in the Cloud". Vox. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  3. Buhr, Sarah (8 July 2014). "Emerald Cloud Laboratory Is Experimenting With Drugs In The Cloud". TechCrunch. Retrieved 24 April 2020.
  4. Segal, Michael (25 September 2019). "An operating system for the biology lab". Nature. pp. S112–S113. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-02875-z. Retrieved 24 April 2020.
  5. Vance, Ashlee (3 July 2014). "Emerald Therapeutics: Biotech Lab for Hire". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 5 July 2017. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  6. Groth, Paul; Cox, Jessica (2017), “Datasets for Potential of Robotic Lab Methods Usage in Biomedical Papers”, Mendeley Data, v3 http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/gy7bfzcgyd.3#file-2066813b-adc9-425e-a347-51122bdbe944
  7. Groth, P.; Cox, J. (2017). "Indicators for the use of robotic labs in basic biomedical research: A literature analysis". PeerJ. 5: e3997. doi:10.7717/peerj.3997. PMC 5681851. PMID 29134146.
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