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Benchling is expanding into the early development market to accelerate the creation of breakthrough products

Benchling | September 17, 2021

Benchling , innovator of the research and development (R&D) cloud for the biotechnology industry, today announced its entry into the early development market. The company brings new solutions to market that enable scientists for the first time to work seamlessly from research to development in a single system. By expanding the range of services, the Benchling R&D cloud is designed to offer both the flexibility and speed required for research efficiency as well as the control and conformity required for compliance with regulations.

The market and society are putting unprecedented pressure on R&D companies to develop new products and get them to market faster. Vaccines typically take years to develop. But in developing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, researchers have been able to get them ready for clinical trials in a matter of months. Faster time to market for innovative biotech products can mean that patients can receive new treatments for life-changing diseases faster, such as the COVID-19 vaccines. It can also mean producing more food with less energy, enriching consumer lives with ethically sourced products, and making businesses more climate-friendly.

The development of such complex, important products requires modern technologies. Different individual solutions for electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN), laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and laboratory execution systems (LES) form silos that exacerbate the challenges of complex collaboration. They force scientists to spend time comparing data between different systems instead of gaining important insights that accelerate product development.

With more than 600 customers spanning a wide range of company sizes, industries and scientific use cases, Benchling relies on customer partnerships to expand its product range. Here are examples of benchling customers who have improved their development speed, scientific knowledge and collaboration within their R&D organizations:

Syngenta is one of the world's largest producers of novel seeds. Worldwide, 35 percent of food is rendered unusable by pests and diseases. New biological solutions and better built-in defense mechanisms not only protect against food waste, but also reduce the need for harmful chemicals that pollute the environment.

Syngenta's work relies on scaling, as our researchers: internally test hundreds of thousands of seeds in a variety of growing environments. When we discover viable varieties that meet the needs of farmers, we need to replenish our seed stocks quickly for testing in laboratories, greenhouses and field trials around the world, “Thanks to benchling, we said goodbye to paper. Our global seed R&D teams can efficiently work together on a single platform to standardize the development of seed varieties from the laboratory to the test field. This has enabled us to restructure much of our work and accelerate the time-to-market for new seed products.

- Charlie Baxter, Head of Traits, Regulatory and Product Safety at Syngenta. 


New workflows: Benchling has expanded the workflows application to support collaboration between specialized R&D teams. Users can now coordinate tasks and processes across teams with full traceability, including methods, samples and inventory. Project managers gain insight into ongoing processes in order to reduce bottlenecks and increase productivity. Workflows help teams from research to development to work together more efficiently and to reach important milestones more quickly.

Structured Templates: With Benchling's new, more structured templates, product development teams can easily create common, standardized processes for repeatable experiments, analytical tests, QC protocols and more. These procedures can be regulated in a targeted manner in order to meet compliance requirements.

Validated cloud: At the beginning of 2021, Benchling switched to a validated cloud in order to be able to provide the platform for customers in a GxP environment.

About Benchling
Benchling is the pioneer for the R&D cloud, software that supports the biotechnology industry. Globally, more than 200,000 scientists in over 600 companies and 7,000 research institutions use Benchling's R&D cloud to make groundbreaking discoveries and bring the next generation of drugs, food and materials to market faster than ever before. The R&D cloud is helping these companies modernize their scientific processes and accelerate collaboration so they can transform the complexities of biology into world-changing results.

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Astellas is promoting the Focus Area Approach that is designed to identify opportunities for the continuous creation of new drugs to address diseases with high unmet medical needs by focusing on Biology and Modality. Furthermore, Astellas is also looking beyond its foundational Rx focus to create Rx+® healthcare solutions that combine its expertise and knowledge with cutting-edge technology in different fields of external partners. Through these efforts, Astellas stands on the forefront of healthcare change to turn innovative science into VALUE for patients. About Poseida Therapeutics, Inc. Poseida Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company advancing differentiated cell and gene therapies with the capacity to cure certain cancers and rare diseases. Poseida's pipeline includes allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy product candidates for both solid and liquid tumors as well as in vivo gene therapy product candidates that address patient populations with high unmet medical need. 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