Getting Synbio Technologies to Market Faster By Reducing Noise in R&D | AIChE

Getting Synbio Technologies to Market Faster By Reducing Noise in R&D

Authors 

Gardner, T. - Presenter, Riffyn, Inc.

R&D in process-oriented disciplines (e.g., life sciences, material science, chemistry, chemical engineering) is burdened by low experimental reproducibility and barriers to transparent collaboration. In academic research, as much as 75% of outcomes are irreproducible. In industrial product development, design/data resources are inaccessible across interdependent teams, and confidence in results remains undefined. This leads to wasteful rework, missed observations, and delayed or failed technology transfer across sites or scales of development. 

R&D today stands at an inflection point, much as auto industry did 50 years ago. At that time, W. Edwards Deming’s teachings on quality helped transform a Japanese manufacturing industry then known for cheap, unreliable parts. Today, such uncompromising quality is ubiquitous in manufacturing, and expected by the customer. Riffyn aims to usher a similar R&D transformation. 

The hard-fought lessons of manufacturing offer enormous potential if applied to R&D. Those lessons are conceptually simple: design your process unambiguously, measure its performance, and improve it continuously. Improved quality delivers greater certainty - greater certainty means better decisions and higher productivity.  But those lessons are not simple to apply in R&D. Heterogeneity of data sources, the dynamic nature of R&D processes, and the complexity of modern R&D organizations have inhibited their adoption.

Riffyn builds the principles of engineering design & quality systems into a flexible, easy-to-use interface for scientists and research staff. A scientist or engineer can iteratively design your experimental process, perform experiments, contextualize experimental results against the process design, and then analyze opportunities for quality improvement and trends for key empirical relationships.  Riffyn software automates data collection and analytical procedures so that researchers can stay focused on science and product development, yet still obtain manufacturing-grade quality in their results. Riffyn acts like a scientific “caddie,” guiding and a supporting researchers toward better outcomes.