Context
Our client’s state of the art research engine is a foundational digital platform we have helped build to advance the potential of mRNA science for a broad range of therapeutics. That research engine has been developed as a greenfield project and combines proprietary technology, design tools, and highly automated pipelines to enable our client and their partners to move mRNA medicines swiftly through the research stages from development to candidate nomination. The ability to digitize such a platform allows our client to quickly adapt and reduce time spent on failures. Since these learnings are digitized, they can easily translate to other drug candidates and improve quality and scalability.
The Project
We have participated in the development of a many key building blocks required to digitize our client’s research engine.
Our scientific software engineering team members participated to the UI/UX design of the front end of the research engine. With the implementation of full stack web applications and graphical user interfaces, the scientists can now digitally design and order mRNA constructs for use in research and preclinical studies. They begin by selecting existing proteins to be further engineered or they can create novel proteins from existing domain, scaffold or other sequences.
The next building block is the ability to leverage cloud computing. Our scientific software developers are utilizing various cloud services to enhance our client scientists’ computational capabilities and reduce cost. These high in the cloud services allow our client to easily scale up or down on demand and automate the processes required to do so.
Next foundational building block is integration. We integrated all data and applications, so they are as efficient as possible. This ecosystem of integrated applications queries data that’s persisted in different data islands of the data fabric. Carrying out this strategy, it was important to remain tactical, so we automated one data island at a time and prioritized urgent problems.
The last foundational building block was Analytics; with a proactive data strategy and tactical approach we supported the expansion of analytics from the start using the integrated eco-system of applications and newly generated FAIR data.
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Outcome
- The research engine we developed together brings mRNA drug sequences to our clients automated high throughput production facility. The digital design and rapid delivery of mRNA constructs enables an experimental philosophy that helps our client move mRNA medicines from idea to development candidate selection in DNA studies and ultimately to clinical trials; at speed and scale not common in the biotech industry. Thanks to the Arrayo scientific software engineering team’s contributions to the research, our client is generating deeper insights about mRNA biology and accelerating the pace of research to advance mRNA medicines into development.