A Bioinformatics Delivery Platform for Kit, Assay, and Solutions Providers
Delight your customers with LatchBio’s customizable bioinformatics delivery platform.
The State of Purchasing Kits and the Struggle for Meaningful Results
Biological kits and assays are crucial in pushing the boundaries of our scientific understanding forward. Getting raw assay data into a state easily accessible and understandable for customers is a non-trivial feat. As their products push the scale and resolution at which we are able to interrogate biology (more cells, more reads, etc.), downstream analysis suffers from uniquely large computing and storage pain.
Take the example of AtlasXOmics, which offers a comprehensive solution to map the spatial epigenome at a cellular resolution. Despite AtlasXOmics’ novel DBiT-seq technology, customers were initially unable to grasp the biological insights they would derive from these assays due to the compute-intensive analyses required to process the data into a meaningful state:
Each kit can produce terabytes worth of raw data for kit providers, making it challenging to share with customers.
The bioinformatics pipelines required to process these datasets require parallelization of multiple computers and several hours to finish. They often point customers to an existing GitHub repository requiring advanced bioinformatics expertise to self-serve. There’s no guarantee that customers can run the pipeline successfully and achieve the final insight themselves.
Once the data has been processed, it is often delivered as text files or CSVs that are not readily digestible by scientific teams. HTML reports or RShiny applications and dashboards are viable workarounds, but they often require internal efforts to customize and deliver on a customer-by-customer basis.
These computational challenges are not unique to AtlasXOmics. Many kit and assay providers experience a frustrating disconnect because customers purchase the kit not solely for the kit but for the scientific questions it enables them to explore.
Due to the compute-intensive nature of high-throughput sequencing data, the journey from assay to insights can be long and arduous for customers, often spanning weeks or even months. This extended timeline diminishes customer satisfaction and delays revenue recognition from subsequent reorders.
Many kit providers are considering building an in-house, customer-facing bioinformatics solution. However, they also worry about the opportunity cost & time sunk into making such a solution production-ready, not to mention the resources required to maintain such a solution long-term.
As a result, many shy away from a differentiated offering with dynamic reports & visualizations, sticking with the tried-and-true status quo: no complementary analyses at all (reducing potential revenue) or sending static reports and zipped data folders over email (reducing insight into whether customers find these outputs useful).
There must be a more straightforward way to ensure every customer experiences that magical "Aha" moment right from day one, immediately after using your kit.
LatchBio has built close partnerships with CROs and kit manufacturers across markets to design a white-labeled, purpose-built bioinformatics platform that delivers analyses to customers quickly.
Key Benefits of a Bioinformatics Delivery Solution
For assay/kit/service providers:
During our partnerships with kit providers, we move mountains to enable kit providers to be superstars in their customer's eyes and deliver the most exceptional service while minimizing the amount of lift they have to do internally.
We’ve narrowed this down to the following key requirements:
Ability to deploy bioinformatics workflows with user-friendly GUIs without having to spend time writing front-end code: Internally, kit providers should focus their time on what they do best: building cutting-edge microfluidic devices that enable unprecedented resolution into the biology and writing bioinformatics pipelines to surface crucial biological insights. Developers should be able to drop in pipeline code written in Nextflow or Snakemake and add minimal metadata to select parameters for end-user interaction. They can then deploy a user-friendly GUI for their pipelines on scalable infrastructure using single-command executions.
Ease of modifying and deploying pipelines to adapt for multiple kits and assay types: Developers should be able to publish pipelines and pick and choose which pipeline version and interface they want to deliver to customers, depending on the specific kit or assay.
White-labeling: If kit providers want to use a third-party platform to deliver bioinformatics results to customers rather than building one in-house, it’s important that the platform looks and feels like their own brand, ensuring a consistent and familiar customer experience.
Bundle the analysis package at the point of sale via coupon generation: Once a customer has bought a kit, they should be able to receive an email, enter a coupon code, and log into a web portal with a curated analysis package—test data, bioinformatics pipeline, visualization application—specific to their kit or assay purchase.
Flexibility to customize and control the customer experience: Kit providers operate across a diverse range of business models, and an ideal third-party solution should be adaptable enough to accommodate these variations. While some kit providers have a high customer volume where giving customers a web portal to self-serve is desirable, others may prefer a white-glove service model, where they do the analyses themselves and deliver one-off data folders or visualization applications to each customer. The flexibility to choose which component of the analysis package to share with a customer is key.
Maximize business intelligence and increase revenue: Without a hosted bioinformatics platform, providers miss out on opportunities to track and fully comprehend the customer journey—from the initial point of sale to the final acquisition of insights. Such comprehensive visibility is indispensable for refining business models, capturing the value derived from bioinformatics analyses, and unlocking new revenue streams. Additionally, this visibility is crucial for providers to proactively identify and address issues with kits and bioinformatics pipelines, thus enabling customer support to act quickly and effectively.
For customers of assay/kit/service providers:
In our work with industry assay/kit/service providers, we've identified several key factors that their customers truly value:
Easy data sharing and collaboration on results with colleagues: Scientific discovery is never done in siloes. Whenever customers finish running the kit and receive data back, they want to share it with their teammates and easily find it for an important scientific meeting.
Full data provenance and traceability: As a biopharma’s R&D function matures, full traceability is a must in order to create detailed reports of data inputs, outputs, and analyses for pre-IND filing and the FDA. A solution provider that can offer customers full data provenance immediately gains a powerful differentiator.
Interactive visualizations to reduce time-to-insight: Most bioinformatics pipelines produce text or CSV files. Interactive visualization is often the most effective way to shorten the loop from raw data to final scientific insights. In working with a spatial transcriptomics provider, 70% of their customers reported they “love the RShiny application experience” the provider gives them.
Point-and-click interface to run bioinformatics analyses without code: While some bioinformatics-savvy customers prefer to download the raw data, clone a GitHub repository, and run the analyses themselves, many scientists prefer to have an intuitive, point-and-click interface to launch standard bioinformatics workflows. Even better yet, repetitive steps like demultiplexing and converting BCL files to FastQs should ideally be automated as soon as the data from the kit / sequencing machine is available.
Ability to connect to their cloud data storage: Many biopharmas already use cloud solutions like AWS S3 or GCP buckets and prefer to retain complete control over their data. This requires that when a bioinformatics pipeline completes, the results are directly saved back into their pre-existing storage buckets. Similarly, the input data should also be housed within these same buckets.
Security: For many customers who process IP-sensitive and/or patient data, HIPAA and SOC II Type 2 compliance are essential. However, building a compliant, in-house platform requires significant engineering investments that could span 6-12 months.
Fast customer support: Whenever customers have issues with raw data, a pipeline, or its result, they want an instant, easy way to share these files and problems with the kit provider. Getting reproducibility instructions for the issues shouldn’t take several back-and-forths over email. The solution providers should have visibility into error logs as soon as they occur and provide resolutions quickly.
Latch is the First Bioinformatics Delivery Platform Focused on the Assay, Kit, and Solutions Provider Market.
Latch offers a bioinformatics delivery to assay, kit, and solution providers, empowering them to deliver a delightful, white-labeled web portal to their customers on day 1.
How it works:
From a kit/ assay/ solution provider point-of-view:
A kit provider can log into the Latch platform and create an internal workspace for their team. With a Latch workspace, they can:
Mount data from various sources (local computer, BaseSpace, AWS, Google Cloud) and have a central, intuitive file system in Latch Data.
Organize samples with contextual metadata in the Latch Registry.
Publish existing Nextflow and Snakemake to their private workspace on Latch while automatically receiving user-friendly, no-code GUI and scalable infrastructure using the Latch SDK.
Create shareable visualization applications.
Within the provider’s Latch workspace, they can iterate on pipeline and application development internally and assemble an “analysis package” to send to customers.
Providers can also create customer workspaces, dispatch an analysis package (with portions from Latch Data, Workflows, Pods, and Registry), and ship it to a customer workspace in just a few clicks.
Like AWS, Latch is a usage-based platform, so as customers store data, run workflows, or use visualization applications, they show up as Latch credits (1 credit = $1). The kit provider has complete visibility into the number of credits incurred for every customer workspace via an Admin Dashboard. They can also quickly transfer credits to a customer. Monitoring credit usage yields valuable insights, helping quantify customer engagement, revealing which aspects of the analysis package are most beneficial, and spurring new creative business models.
Additionally, providers can subscribe to alerts for failed customer workflows, enabling rapid response and proactive customer support.
From a customer of a kit/ assay/ solution provider point-of-view:
They log into a beautiful, easy-to-use platform with the kit provider’s branding.
They are welcomed with a workspace curated for their specific assays. They only see the test data and workflow that they need. Customers can run bioinformatics pipelines themselves or, with a simple click on Latch Pods, access interactive visualizations through an intuitive application.
The entire process, from raw data to final insights, is streamlined, empowering them to achieve results in just one day.
To learn more about Latch’s complete production solution for kit, assay, and solution providers, access the full product sheet below or sign up for a free 7-day trial: