In a significant step towards addressing the reproducibility crisis in science, techbio startup Briefly Bio has launched with software designed to enhance the reproducibility of lab work. The reproducibility crisis, particularly in preclinical research, has seen over 50% of experimental efforts fail to be replicated, costing the industry more than $50 billion annually. Briefly Bio aims to mitigate these losses by providing scientists with tools to capture and share their work more clearly and consistently.

With this launch, Briefly Bio has also secured a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round led by Compound VC, with participation from NP Hard, Tiny VC, and various angel investors from the tech and biotech sectors.

The complexity of biological experiments has increased, leading to critical details often being undocumented and lost. This issue hampers scientific collaboration, as lab scientists struggle to reproduce and build on each other's work, data scientists lack the context needed for analysis, and automation teams miss details crucial for building robotic labs.

Briefly Bio addresses this problem by creating a consistent, shared language for experiments that is clear to any collaborator. Their software uses AI to convert existing experiment descriptions into a standardized format, automatically filling gaps and spotting errors. This approach captures the value of each experiment, enabling scientists to learn from each other’s work.

Briefly Bio was founded by Dr. Katya Putintseva, Harry Rickerby, and Staffan Piledahl, who have diverse backgrounds in academia, tech, biotech, and robotics. The trio previously worked together at drug discovery startup LabGenius, where they contributed to building its machine learning-driven antibody discovery platform.

Harry Rickerby, CEO and co-founder of Briefly Bio, commented, "Scientific methods are a bit like software code, they are a set of instructions that define how an experiment should be run. The majority of this ‘code’ is incomplete, since writing up each experiment completely takes a huge amount of effort. Now, with LLMs, there’s a way to make these methods consistent without imposing on a scientists’ workflow. As Github helped software engineers collaborate and build on each other’s code, we think Briefly can help scientists and engineers do the same with their experiments."

With AI and high throughput experimentation, there is potential for significant improvements in the efficiency of scientific discovery. To realize this potential, science needs more consistency and transparency in how datasets are generated, as the value of any model depends on the data it has been trained on. Briefly Bio is building the necessary infrastructure to accelerate scientific discovery in biology.

“This is a revolution in documenting lab experiments. It is the future of foolproof knowledge-sharing between scientists” said Dr Gena Nikitin, Founder of Miphic. While Dr Maria Anastasina, Wet Lab Head at the Evolutionary and Synthetic Biology Unit, OIST, added: “Briefly has become a core part of our lab's knowledge base and a great help to me in training researchers and lab management”. And Suparna Kumar, PhD student at Weill Cornell commented: “Briefly Bio has become an indispensable part of my lab routine because it helps me save so much time”.

Shelby Newsad, Investor at Compound, commented: “The crux of successful science lies in consistent and executable methods. Whereas most bio software companies focus on data and its analysis, Briefly goes upstream to the core problem space of reproducibility via protocols. For the first time in science history, this incentivizes scientists to share more of their previously tacit knowledge. The fact that Briefly-made methods can be built and collaborated upon creates unique potential for network effects from their software.”

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