Thrive Bioscience: Analytics and Automation for Better Cell Biology

Thomas Forest Farb, Co-Founder, President & Board Director
Numerous studies have shown that an astounding percentage of pre-clinical research is not reproducible across labs. While this replication crisis has long-standing roots, a key reason behind the issue, as some studies have shown, is the manual methods employed for cell culture. To add to the problem, documentation is almost non-existent, or at least not accessible, regarding cells’ condition or the cell culture processes used. So if an experiment fails, or even if an experiment succeeds, researchers have minimal documentation to determine the precise reasons for the experiment’s success or failure. One of the first companies to address these roadblocks to better research is Thrive Bioscience. The company’s family of products ensures reproducible protocols for cell culture, along with a slew of images and metrics to document and analyze cell culture processes thoroughly.

“We are a pioneer in the area of automated, programmable cell culture and maintenance systems that combine extensive image capture and analytics, encapsulated within a closed incubation environment,” claims Thomas Forest Farb-Horch, president, co-founder, and board director of Thrive Bioscience. The company’s products increase the efficiency and effectiveness of cell culture processes, but more importantly, provide better data, clearer insights, and greater quality control that was previously unavailable.

Thrive’s products include CellAssist, a bench-top instrument that collects and catalogs data and images, helping a researcher get precise reports, analyses, and workflow advice. Another product, to be delivered in 2021, is the AutoImager which delivers continuous, automatic movement of 30 to 100 cell culture plates between CellAssist and an incubator in a closed environment for 24/7 imaging.
In addition to these products, Thrive BioScience is currently testing its Alpaca Cell Culture System, an instrument that automates cell culture processes and reduces human errors through the use of robotics and fluidics and is combined with CellAssist’s capabilities, all in a controlled environment. These offerings are set for commercial launch between 2020 and 2022.

However, the tenacity of Thrive Bioscience’s offerings is not limited to digitalizing cell culture processes alone. “To ensure a better documentation methodology inside a lab, Thrive’s products provide self-populating lab notebooks that automatically document the processes and inputs (such as the reagents and cell lines),” states Farb. This solution breathes a sigh of relief for lab managers who often complain about being unaware of the details of every activity taking place inside their labs and despite using advanced analytical instruments. Alongside, to eliminate variability in the lab process from researcher to researcher, Thrive’s products provide access to their historical information to researchers for verifying accuracy of their cell culture techniques, in case their experiment fails to achieve expected outcomes.

With a product portfolio that vast, Thrive aims to solve some significant roadblocks in the present drug discovery, biomedical research, and cell therapeutics landscape and usher a new standard in cell culture processes. “We aim to serve a wide range of clients, from research labs to pre-clinical production with our family of products that utilize a common set of proprietary image processing software, analytics, optics, and sensors,” reassures Farb. Thrive’s products are designed to help drug discovery and biomedical research companies save immense public and corporate spending while also decreasing the time to market new medicines. This is because Thrive’s automated products can help a researcher complete tasks that initially took hours to complete. “Our objective is, and shall always remain in taking the art out of cell culture and delivering high-quality science, because good science needs good cells,” concludes Farb.

Company
Thrive Bioscience

Headquarters
Boston, MA

Management
Thomas Forest Farb, Co-Founder, President & Board Director

Description
Thrive Bioscience is the first company to meet the need for automated, programmable cell culture & maintenance systems combined with extensive image capture & analytics, all within a closed incubation environment. Thrive’s innovative systems provide reproducible protocols, scalable cell propagation, analytics, and complete process history documentation with supporting images. Their system also provides an interactive partnership between cell technicians and grows, maintain, and manipulate cells. Through automation, careful monitoring and analysis, Thrive systems remove causes of variation inherent in manual cell culture. They are taking the art out of cell culture and delivering high-quality science