Briefly Bio Secures $1.2M Funding to Address Reproducibility Crisis in Science

Science is currently facing a reproducibility crisis, particularly in preclinical research, where over 50% of efforts to replicate experiments fail. This inefficiency costs the industry more than $50 billion annually. Addressing this critical issue, techbio startup Briefly Bio has launched with innovative software designed to make lab work more reproducible. This software aids scientists in capturing and sharing their work with greater clarity and consistency.

The launch of Briefly Bio is bolstered by a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round led by Compound VC, with additional participation from NP Hard, Tiny VC, and various angel investors from the tech and biotech sectors.

As biological experiments grow increasingly complex, the lack of documented critical details has made scientific collaboration inefficient. Lab scientists struggle to replicate and build on each other's work, data scientists lack the context needed to analyze data, and automation teams cannot fully develop robotic labs due to missing information. Briefly Bio aims to resolve these issues by creating a shared and consistent language for experiments, understandable by any collaborator.

The software employs AI to convert existing experiment descriptions into a standardized format, automatically filling in gaps and identifying errors. This approach captures the value of every experiment and facilitates learning within the scientific community.

Founded by Dr. Katya Putintseva, Harry Rickerby, and Staffan Piledahl, who have diverse backgrounds in academia, tech, biotech, and robotics, Briefly Bio emerged from their collaborative work at drug discovery startup LabGenius, where they contributed to building an ML-driven antibody discovery platform.

Harry Rickerby, CEO and co-founder of Briefly Bio, commented, "Scientific methods are like software code, defining how an experiment should be run. Most of this 'code' is incomplete because documenting each experiment fully is labor-intensive. Now, with LLMs, we can make these methods consistent without disrupting scientists' workflows. As Github helped software engineers collaborate, we believe Briefly can do the same for scientists and engineers with their experiments."

The introduction of AI and high throughput experimentation presents a significant opportunity to enhance the efficiency of scientific discovery. With substantial investments from startups and big pharma, achieving consistency and transparency in dataset generation is crucial. Briefly Bio aims to provide the necessary infrastructure to accelerate scientific discovery in biology.

Dr. Gena Nikitin, Founder of Miphic, described Briefly Bio's innovation as a revolution in documenting lab experiments, while Dr. Maria Anastasina from OIST and Suparna Kumar from Weill Cornell praised the software for its impact on lab management and time efficiency. Rob Harkness, CTO of Biosero, emphasized the importance of converting scientific protocols into a consistent format to improve workflow integration, efficiency, and data quality.

Shelby Newsad, an investor at Compound, highlighted that Briefly Bio addresses the core issue of reproducibility in scientific methods, creating unique potential for collaborative efforts and network effects.

Ultimately, Briefly Bio is poised to transform the scientific landscape by enabling researchers to produce reproducible datasets, thereby expanding our understanding of biology more rapidly and efficiently.