Elsie Biotechnologies

Putting power in the hands of scientists through data and analysis accessibility

People ask if there have been any tools that have been game changing to allow us to do our work, and I'm always, like, it's Latch. It's brought the power back to us.”

Headshot of Dillon Flood

Dillon Flood, Co-founder, Elsie Biotechnologies

TL;DR

Elsie Biotechnologies is a San Diego biotech company changing the discovery, delivery, and development of oligonucleotide therapeutics. Their mission is to utilize the power of DNA to cure diseases. As a small team, they struggled to get bioinformatics tools into the hands of their team of scientists.

With Latch, Elsie is able to put critical bioinformatics tools in the hands of every scientist, enabling better experimental design and reduced time to iterate on experiments. Since adopting Latch, Elsie achieved:

  • Faster Oligo screening

    By enabling scientists to design, analyze and run the pipelines themselves, the team has rapidly increased their oligo screening pipeline.

  • Improved experimental design

    Scientists now design better experiments with a deeper level of access, understanding, and ownership over of their data.

  • 80% reduction in NGS analysis costs

    A typical analysis of Bulk RNA-seq was $2000, the average run is now $150-200.

Industry/Assays

RNA Therapeutics

Based

San Diego, CA

Elsie’s Story

Elsie Biotechnologies is a biotech company utilizing the power of DNA and RNA to cure disease. Today diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (AMS), Huntington's disease, and Alzheimer's disease are caused by problems with proteins.

A relatively new approach called Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) can target mRNA molecules to block the production of problematic proteins. This could potentially slow down or entirely stop the progression of these diseases.

a scientist at work in an Elsie Laboratory

Unfortunately, many RNA therapeutics fail today due to a lack of chemical control. Changing a single atom in a therapeutic sequence can vastly alter its efficacy. This has caused a halt in progress in the otherwise promising space of RNA therapeutics.

Elsie Biotechnologies aims to solve this problem and unlock the potential of RNA therapeutics by leveraging ultra high-throughput screening of oligonucleotides. Their vision is developing oligonucleotide therapeutics with increased potency, decreased toxicity, and optimized delivery.

Challenges

To discover the best oligos, Elsie leverages complex bioinformatics to design oligo libraries, and next generation sequencing (NGS) to test gene knockdown in various disease models:

Our platform utilizes bioinformatics pipelines to design libraries which we then synthesize in the lab. Our platform relies on sequencing to process data through another pipeline to help us pick our oligo hits. This generates 60-70 GB of data.

This feedback loop for getting insight out of data was previously 2 weeks to 1 month and would cause pain points when trying to iterate on new experiments... getting bioinformatics tools in the hands of the scientists actually running the experiments is always an issue...”

Dillon and his scientific team decided to explore platforms that would help scientists easily run bioinformatics pipelines themselves. After a trial with Latch they found the platform easy to set up and readily usable for the non-coder.

A Paradigm Shift Towards Self-Service

I am not a bioinformatician. I'm a chemist and I design web lab experiments. So when I was able to routinely use the Latch interface and produce usable data faster than I was doing before through the command line, that was all I needed to get me on board...

The team continued to upload all of their internal bioinformatics pipelines to a private account for scientists to run. Soon data pipelines for their whole experimental campaign - library design, barcode analysis, and machine learning - were all available for scientists on Latch.

Impact

The impact of this shift has been the acceleration of new and better experiments. Scientists are now able to design the next experiment themselves instantly without waiting for a hand-off.

It enables us to do better experiments because it puts data in the hands of the scientists actually running those experiments...

To have the people who run the experiments, actually be the ones driving the data processing and kind of owning the results, I think is really, really important.”

The team has also noticed a dramatic reduction in NGS analysis costs, allowing them to reserve bioinformatics funds for difficult questions.

It brought our analysis costs down by 80%. RNAseq data analysis used to cost like $2,000 every time, and now it's like $150 every time... this has also allowed us to put that money and focus our bionformatician's time towards solving the tough problems, not just the routine analysis.”

Yet the most impactful thing has been the acceleration of core R&D milestones for the team at Elsie.

Ultimately it has allowed us run the platform faster and screen more oligos for discovering new therapeutics”

Outcomes

Elsie Biotechnologies has successfully transformed their research process by adopting Latch, empowering scientists to directly access and utilize essential bioinformatics tools. This paradigm shift has led to faster oligo screening, improved experimental designs, and an impressive 80% reduction in NGS analysis costs.

By bridging the gap between informaticians and scientists, Latch has enabled the Elsie Bio team to overcome previous challenges and accelerate their pursuit of groundbreaking RNA therapeutics. The adoption of Latch not only streamlines the research process but also fosters a sense of ownership and control among scientists.

Elsie Biotechnologies remains at the forefront of innovation in the development of oligonucleotide therapeutics to combat devastating diseases.