Benchling Expands into Early Development Market to Accelerate Delivery of Breakthrough Products

R&D Cloud takes on legacy ELN, LIMS, and LES software with a single unified solution

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Benchling, pioneer of the R&D Cloud powering the biotechnology industry, today announced the company's entry into the Early Development market, launching new solutions that allow scientists to seamlessly move from research through development within a single system for the first time. Through the expansion of Benchling's offerings, the R&D Cloud is designed to accommodate both the flexibility and speed needed for research efficiency, as well as the control and compliance required for regulated processes.

"Given Benchling's early focus on Research, we have been fortunate to witness our customers turn discoveries into products, and support their transition into Development," said Sajith Wickramasekara, CEO and co-founder of Benchling. "This customer-led approach to expansion gave us an up-close view of the complex coordination required and how scientific collaboration on a single, unified system can improve speed and quality."

There is unprecedented market and societal pressure on R&D organizations to develop new products and get them to market faster. Vaccines typically take years to develop, but scientists were able to develop multiple COVID-19 vaccines and treatments and get them into clinical trials in months. Getting innovative bioproducts to market more quickly can mean patients receiving new treatments for life-altering conditions sooner, as with the COVID-19 vaccines. It can also mean more food with less energy, enriching consumers' lives with ethically-sourced products, and businesses reducing their contribution to climate change.

Developing such complex, important products requires modern technology. Disparate point solutions for electronic lab notebooks (ELN), laboratory information management systems (LIMS), and laboratory execution systems (LES) create silos that exacerbate the inherent challenges of complex collaboration, forcing scientists to spend time reconciling data between various systems instead of surfacing and sharing key insights that accelerate product development.

Scientists want a single interface that reflects how their organizations work, gives them access to higher quality data, streamlines collaboration, and makes technology transfer seamless. R&D IT teams want to provide solutions to their business that improve data management, stay current with industry innovations, and offer no-code configuration.

With over 600 customers across a wide range of company sizes, industries, and scientific use cases, Benchling draws upon customer partnerships to inform its product roadmap. Here are examples of Benchling customers that have increased their development speed, scientific insights, and collaboration across their R&D organizations:

• Editas Medicine is a pioneer in gene editing. The company was the first to dose a patient in vivo with a CRISPR gene editing medicine, EDIT-101. EDIT-101 is designed to correct a genetic mutation that causes childhood blindness.
   
  "As one of the first companies using CRISPR to treat disease, we needed a software that could keep up with the rapidly evolving science of gene editing. We chose Benchling early on, and our two companies have grown alongside each other," said Christopher Wilson, Ph.D., Vice President, Lead Discovery, Editas Medicine. "With Benchling already in place for research, adopting their new early development solutions helped us transition data seamlessly from discovery through development, and ultimately get potentially transformative medicines into the clinic and to patients faster."
   
• Syngenta is one of the largest producers of novel crop seeds in the world. Globally, pests and diseases waste 35% of food. Biologically derived solutions and better built-in defenses not only protect food from being wasted, they also reduce the need for harmful chemicals that ultimately affect the environment.
   
  "Syngenta's work relies on scale because our researchers test hundreds of thousands of seeds in different growth environments. When we discover viable candidates to address grower needs we must rapidly scale up seed stocks to enable testing in labs, greenhouses, and field trials around the world," said Charlie Baxter, Head of Traits, Regulatory, and Product Safety at Syngenta. "Thanks to Benchling, we've said goodbye to paper and our global seeds R&D teams can work together efficiently on a single platform to standardize the development of seed candidates from the lab to the test field. It's allowed us to rethink how we structure much of our work — accelerating new seed products to market."

Benchling supports the distinct needs of Early Development with the recent addition of three key innovations:

• Reimagined Workflows: Benchling has expanded its Workflows application to support the collaborative work that takes place across specialized R&D teams. Users can now coordinate task requests and processes across teams with full traceability, including methods, samples, and inventory. Program leaders gain visibility into operational data to reduce bottlenecks and increase productivity. Workflows helps teams from discovery to development work more efficiently together and reach critical milestones faster.
• Structured Templates: With Benchling's new, more structured templates, Development teams can easily create shared, standardized processes for repeatable experiments, analytical tests, QC protocols, and more. These procedures can be locked down to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
• Validated Cloud: Earlier in 2021, Benchling also released Validated Cloud to support customers using the platform in GxP environments.

About Benchling
Benchling is the pioneer of the R&D Cloud, software that powers the biotechnology industry. More than 200,000 scientists at over 600 companies and 7,000 research institutions globally have adopted Benchling's R&D Cloud to make breakthrough discoveries and bring the next generation of medicines, food, and materials to market faster than ever before. The R&D Cloud helps these organizations modernize their scientific processes and accelerate collaboration so they can convert the complexity of biology into world-changing results. For more, please visit Benchling.com.

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