Strateos – Developing Remote Access Laboratories and Lab Control Software for Life Sciences Sector

Remote experiments for teaching and learning in the science and engineering subject areas have been around for over 20 years now. Their widespread penetration across the curricular at higher education level, as their proponents have predicted, has yet to be achieved. However, the authors maintain there is still a significant potential here. This paper highlights key lessons learned from the authors’ work in this field over the last 10 years. Key to this is the move of the focus from solving the technical issues of how to make remote control of teaching experiments possible to addressing the pedagogical challenges of doing so in a way that is effective in teaching and learning.

Strateos is a pioneer in the development of remote access laboratories and robust lab control software for life science discovery. The company’s mission is to create new knowledge driven by data, computation, automation, and high-throughput robotics with the goal of fundamentally advancing the life sciences. Strateos is reimagining and redefining laboratories as smart data centers by enabling both remote-control and on-demand access to its automated cloud labs for rapid and clean data generation, and the ability for organizations to deploy the software to automate, command and control their own private laboratories even in labs with no automation currently.

Leveraging Cutting-Edge Services for Life Sciences Sector

AI for Drug Discovery: The Strateos Platform automates chemistry, biology, and tissue analysis into closed loop robotic labs that accelerate drug discovery programs. Through a combination of best-in-class robotics and control systems, advanced software for imaging and analytics, and remote cloud laboratories, they enable their pharmaceutical partners to more rapidly and efficiently discover new drug candidates. One can automate, harmonize and unify phenotypic and biochemical, acoustic mass spec, ADME, imaging, genomic and operational datasets to interrogate and prosecute of a variety of data science and AI use cases to further accelerate research and discovery across the life sciences. The Strateos platform provides secure APIs for programmatic integration into its clients existing data engineering pipelines, software systems and data analysis tools, thereby increasing system interoperability.

Discovery Biology: The Strateos platform connects remote research and development teams to Strateos’ two smart labs for on-demand access to a suite of integrative discovery biology products and services. And control of robotics and analytical instrumentation enabling the execution of a broad range of cutting-edge technologies and scientific workflows in the cloud.

Small Molecule Drug Discovery: Strateos’ integrated small molecule discovery workflows for hit ID, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization studies combined with unparalleled scope of capabilities in robotics and automation allow us to deliver quality hits that progress to lead candidates. Furthermore, its automated medicinal chemistry capabilities are propelling the design-make-test-analyze drug discovery cycles to new heights of speed and efficiency.

Tissue Technology: Disease is ultimately caused by changes in the molecules and cells that define how a tissue functions and interacts with the other tissues in human bodies. The Strateos Tissue Technology group is advancing drug discovery programs by developing high-throughput automated tissue sectioning and analytical imaging technologies. The company’s goal is to help the customer’s link molecular and cellular functions throughout different tissue and organ structures through its innovative tissue profiling service; it helps researchers identify disease-causing transitions earlier in the onset of disease so they can intervene with more insight and at earlier stages.

A Relentlessly Reliable Leader

Mark Fischer-Colbrie is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Strateos. He has more than 30 years of experience in building and growing laboratory tools, diagnostic, medical device and therapeutic companies, including 3 Initial Public Offerings. In 2013, Mark was named National Finalist, Life Sciences for the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year, Life Sciences for Northern California. Prior to Strateos, Mark was CEO for over ten years at Labcyte Inc. which invented novel lab tools and automation based on acoustic dispensing. Before Labcyte, Mark ran business development and was CFO at Adeza Biomedical Corporation, a women’s healthcare company, where he filed 9 patent applications and set up and ran clinical trials for diagnostics. Prior to Adeza, Mark was the CFO for 9 years for a vision correction company that went public and launched a Class III medical device.

Mark holds a BA from Stanford and an MBA in marketing / finance from UC Berkeley. Mark has served as Chairman of JDRF’s International Board of Directors, the largest global funder of type one diabetes research, and served on the JDRF IBOD for seven years. Mark has also served on the industry board of the Analytical, Life Sciences Diagnostics Association (ALDA) since 2011.

“The Strateos SmartLab Platform™ helps scientists more efficiently and reproducibly design, run, and analyze experiments to achieve new and faster scientific discoveries.”