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Emerald Cloud Lab

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Emerald Cloud Lab
Company typePrivate
PredecessorEmerald Therapeutics
Founded2010; 14 years ago (2010)
Founder
  • D.J. Kleinbaum
  • Brian Frezza
Headquarters,
United States
Websiteemeraldcloudlab.com

Emerald Cloud Lab is a privately-owned biotech startup. The company is among the first to offer laboratory automation through the software as a service model. D.J. Kleinbaum and Brian Frezza founded Emerald Cloud Lab in 2010.[1]

History

Founding

D.J. Kleinbaum and Brian Frezza grew up together on Emerald Drive, in the Philadelphia suburbs, and they long wanted to build a biotechnology business together. In 2010, after completing their PhDs, they came together to found Emerald Therapeutics in an effort to develop "antiviral therapy for diseases such as hepatitis and HIV". During this time, they experienced problems with laboratory hardware and software. Hardware often comes from disparate manufacturers, software is often rudimentary, and output can vary in formatting. To simplify laboratory testing, the group wrote centralized management software for the different machines and a database to store all metadata and results.[2] This "laboratory operating system" became Emerald Therapeutic's first product, launched in 2014 under the name Emerald Cloud Lab.[citation needed]

Business development

As of 2014, Emerald Cloud Lab offered 40 types of laboratory tests, with intent to expand to over a hundred by the next year.[2]

Researchers and pharmaceutical groups have long been concerned about the lack of reproducibility of laboratory testing in the biomedical field. A 2017 paper used Emerald Cloud Lab and a similar company, Transcriptic, to explore how robotic lab automation could ameliorate this problem. The paper concludes that, "we believe that robotic labs can provide the basis for performing a large percentage of basic biomedical research in a reproducible and transparent fashion".[3] Frezza has described this laboratory inconsistency as one specific reason for the development of Emerald Cloud Lab and the use of automation.[1]

Financing

The business got its second round of funding by 2014 from the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel. This funding round provided $13.5 million.[2]

References

  1. ^ a b Garner, Rochelle. "Science labs in the cloud: Champagne discoveries, beer budget". Cnet. Archived from the original on 28 October 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
  2. ^ a b c Vance, Ashlee (3 July 2014). "Emerald Therapeutics: Biotech Lab for Hire". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 5 July 2017. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  3. ^ Groth, P.; Cox, J. (2017). "Indicators for the use of robotic labs in basic biomedical research: A literature analysis". PeerJ. 5: e3997. doi:10.7717/peerj.3997. PMC 5681851. PMID 29134146.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)