Synthace

Ever been curious about applying Design of Experiments to your experimentation, but never had anyone to ask about it? Now’s the time to get your questions answered by our experts. Next month, our biologists turned DOE evangelists Drs Michael Sadowski (aka Sid) and James Arpino (JAJA) will be hosting the first session in our new webinar mini series, DOE Office Hours. If you’ve got a question, submit it in advance as you register. If not, come along anyway and hear Sid and JAJA provide answers on: – Choosing designs, factors, and levels – Building models – Understanding results – How to choose your next experiment – Anything else you'd like to understand better about DOE for biology See you there? 📅 Date: August 15th 🔗 Register Now: https://lnkd.in/edpdH4MG #DOE #DesignOfExperiments #DOEforBiology

Sometimes, all you need to shift your perspective is a change of circumstance. Recently, Markus Gershater tells Don Davis PhD, MBA in Life Science Success Podcast how he didn't appreciate the value in DOE until he found himself in an industrial setting: "When I was in industry, I was doing biotransformations, where you’re doing chemistry, but with biological systems. That’s either an enzyme to catalyze the reaction, or even whole systems, where you put in a substrate and it gets converted by that microbe into whatever the outcome is. Early on, I was challenged by a process that had been developed in an academic environment, which I then needed to industrialize. I sat down and worked out all the different things that I might want to investigate. Naturally you start thinking about all the things that could affect your process. You keep listing them and listing them, and then you realize that there’s way more things than you can ever hope to investigate. I was very fortunate, as my dad originally worked in process development and had been talking to me about multivariate experiments—a method where you investigate multiple things simultaneously—for a long time. He’d been trying to convince me to work this way during my PhD. At the time, I thought, 'He’s my dad, what does he know?' ... But faced with an industrial setting, I realized that whereas with a PhD you have 3 or 4 years to chip away at all that biological complexity and make it work, in industry I only had 4 months. It was then that I thought, 'Maybe my dad might have known something after all.'" Want to learn more about how Markus ended up improving the yield of his process 7-fold, and what else he discussed with Don? Listen to the full recording here: https://lnkd.in/ehtsWkv2 #DesignOfExperiments #DOE #DOEForBiology

When planning your DOE and thinking about which factors to investigate, and how to change them, there's a line to toe. To avoid spending too much effort re-learning things that are already known, you'll need to use your pre-existing knowledge. But at the same time, familiarity shouldn't breed complacency. It’s all too easy to develop experiments that confirm, rather than test, hypotheses. Not having a well-developed and robust theoretical framework for your experiment will prevent you from getting to grips with the complexity of your system. Let's say you want to optimize the expression of a target protein in bacterial cell culture. If you know, for instance, which growth media achieve high yields when you’re trying to optimize protein production with DOE, usually there's no need to confirm this experimentally. Formulae for many cell growth media, on the other hand, have been handed down and used unquestioningly by scientists for generations. Why would you risk taking something out if your cells might not grow properly? Because calculated risks are part of science. Cell growth is complex and there’s no perfect medium that gives excellent results in every possible case. It’s likely that many ingredients aren’t necessary for specific applications or may even be harmful: High levels of zinc may inhibit the growth of certain bacteria, for example. Investigating the composition of such apparently standard parts of the workflow can be useful: Some “unnecessary” components of the media can be very expensive, while others are actively harmful for the specific application. The moral of the story? Be open-minded. DOE gives you the tools to investigate your system in an unbiased way, which often reveals new insights and generates novel hypotheses. For best results, assume you don't know everything. #DOE #DesignOfExperiments #DOEForBiology

What's the deal with scientists and climbing? 🧗 This week in Synthesis: – Lucia Dunajová ponders whether scientists' love of problem-solving means they're drawn to hobbies like climbing – Nathan Hardingham and other folks online geek out over predicting the Euro results with the new robot from FORMULATRIX –  Markus Gershater shares his latest musings on why AI hasn't yet made its mark on drug discovery with Technology Networks – You CAN do a DOE experiment in an afternoon, proven by Nathan, who shows how to use Synthace DOE and a powerful liquid handler from HAMILTON ROBOTICS LIMITED to get the job done quickly and effectively In content we're loving: – A humanized mouse that mounts mature class-switched, hypermutated and neutralizing antibody responses – Trigeminal ganglion neurons are directly activated by influx of CSF solutes in a migraine mode – Nanoplastics in Water: Artificial intelligence assisted 4D physiochemical characterization and rapid in situ detection #DOE #DesignOfExperiments #LabAutomation #DrugDiscovery

We love to see our people getting the recognition they deserve. Congratulations to: Abdul Rahim Bah on your promotion to Director of Engineering Erika Wiseman on your promotion to Field Application Scientist II 🎉

Executing a DOE experiment in an afternoon isn't a pipe dream. It's a real possibility, and it's already here. Our Customer Success Scientist Nathan Hardingham shows how you can use Synthace DOE and a powerful liquid handler from Hamilton Robotics to get the job done quickly and effectively. In this case, it was optimizing the expression of a fluorescent-tagged protein of interest in neural stem cells. 7 factors. 96 runs. 3 replicates. 1000 (ish) liquid handling actions. Easy. #LabAutomation #DOE #DesignOfExperiments #DOEForBiology

What does the electrification of factories back in the 19th century have in common with applying AI to drug discovery today? For one, as our Chief Scientific Officer Markus Gershater points out in his latest piece for Technology Networks, both are new technologies that need time and significant changes to working practices. Realizing the full potential of electrification, for instance, didn't just involve swapping steam engines for electric engines. It meant making fundamental changes to how factories were run—something that took 50 years to take effect. And just like the promise that electric engines held in the 19th century, in drug discovery today the huge number of exceptionally diverse, AI generated targets are an opportunity: They represent a wealth of potential therapeutic programs.   But as Markus warns, their potential could be wasted, unless the rest of the drug discovery process can ramp up to meet the challenge. Read his full piece here: https://lnkd.in/ehc6xNRq #DrugDiscovery #AI 

The bittersweet truth about geography 🌎 This week in Synthesis: – Fatima Faizi reflects on how moving from Pakistan to the UK impacted where she is in her professional life today – After reading a review by Jack Scannell et al. (Nature Portfolio's Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 21, p 915–931 (2022)), Markus Gershater wonders why we aren't investing in the best possible models right from the beginning of discovery – Nathan Hardingham quizzes Markus on camera and discovers that Synthace came from a "mixture of frustration and enthusiasm" when conducting wet lab experiments – Potential Synthacers to be, you've got until the end of today to submit your application for Nuno Leitão and Lucia Dunajová's Associate Scientist role—submit now before it's too late! In content we're loving: – dsRNA formulation leads to preferential nuclear export and gene expression – Climate crisis ground truths – Dermal bioavailability of perfluoroalkyl substances using in vitro 3D human skin equivalent models #DrugDiscovery #LabAutomation #DOE #DesignOfExperiments #LifeSciences #Hiring

We can't help scientists, help the world, unless people are at the heart of everything we do. That's why we're incredibly proud to to be ranked on the UK's Best Workplaces for Wellbeing™ list by Great Place To Work UK. Want to join us? Nuno Leitão and Lucia Dunajová are hiring Associate Scientists—applications close tomorrow! #GPTW #GreatPlaceToWork #LifeSciences #Hiring

There's no denying it: Multicellular models offer huge potential in early drug discovery. They provide a more physiologically relevant environment that boosts success rates further down the development pipeline. The question today becomes, how can we make better use of them, with the (limited) resources that we have? Our very own Markus Gershater, along with the British Heart Foundation's Kavita R. and SPT Labtech's Maryia Karpiyevich, PhD, are on hand to talk solutions. Join them on June 26 at 11 am EDT / 8 am PDT / 4 pm BST to learn about how we can use advances in software and hardware automation in assay development to: – Offer more accurate predictability of new drug candidates – Leverage resources more efficiently through streamlined workflows and data-driven decision-making #DrugDiscovery #LabAutomation #LiquidHandling