Umoja Biopharma
Transforming immunotherapy by making AI-ready data a first-class asset
Speed up the delivery of promising candidates to the clinic through establishing a centralized, standardized ecosystem.
Results
Faster IND filings and audits
A central source of truth for accessible data fuels the growing needs of Umoja’s business, facilitating swifter time to milestone.
Efficient, data-driven decisions
Standardized data capture across R&D creates a FAIR data foundation for faster, more confident decision making.
Growth through improved collaboration
Better efficiency resulted in happier employees and better collaboration, leading to overall company growth and retention.
Challenges
| Driving user adoption and platform value | Umoja’s previous usage of laboratory informatics systems - and its corresponding lack of structure - made data difficult to capture, find, share, and understand across different groups, resulting in lower user adoption of software investments. |
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| Developing a centralized system of record | Umoja leadership recognized the need to have a centralized system of record for their R&D teams, one that supported a standardized, structured data model. |
| Achieving cross-departmental collaboration at scale | A lack of software utilization hampered Umoja’s ability to scale their business, as researchers could not efficiently hand off projects, find what they needed to begin daily tasks, nor ask team members for help. |
Outcomes
| Increasing operational efficiency and growth | Umoja has provided their researchers a system that facilitates rather than hinders their various projects. As Umoja introduced Benchling, the company first started with teams whose data capture is easily structured and fairly consistent across experiments. As other teams saw the power of structured data tables, they asked to participate, eager to experience the same data capture efficiencies. Since the introduction of Benchling, there has been a 4x increase in high-activity utilization of their R&D informatics platform. As a result of improving user adoption and increasing operational efficiency, Benchling has helped Umoja to grow rapidly. |
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| Creating a standardized data structure | Data is a critical asset for Umoja in developing their transformational therapies, making data integrity key even at the earliest R&D stages. Over time, Benchling has driven more effective data capture through the use of structured tables. Templates and subtemplates have helped to further standardize processes, enabling scientists to spend less time copying and modifying existing entries. By creating a standardized data structure within Benchling, Umoja is working toward AI readiness. Using AI to glean insights from data first requires quality, structured data. This involves capturing sufficient context and metadata, along with maintaining good data practices. With Benchling, Umoja is building a strong foundation for the future of powerful machine learning models. |
| Collaborating more effectively within a unified system | The data structure that Umoja has been able to capture within Benchling has allowed their 11 different R&D groups spread across 3 different sites to use the same centralized system, fostering effective collaboration. Benchling supports teams in this cross-departmental communication in several ways. Researchers can collaboratively edit notebook entries as they perform experimental work, and they can see edits appearing in real time. This means researchers no longer have to worry about any lost data from load issues or merge conflicts. They’re also setting up workflows in Benchling to capture two sample types: Analytical Samples for testing and Candidate Samples for efficacy testing/in vitro models. Sample shipment and receipt workflows ensure that samples are sent and arrive between Umoja’s different sites. That way, scientists can plan time efficiently depending on when samples arrive. |
