Parallel Bio’s head of technology shares a vision for faster, cheaper, and better biological research with human organoids.
[Dr. Microbe/Adobe Stock]
The biotech startup is betting on automation and organoid technology to make experiments faster, more efficient, and more reliable, freeing up scientists to ponder big experimental design questions. “You have robots potentially doing more of the grunt work in the lab and just doing stuff 24/7,” said Gesher.
Gesher believes that Parallel Bio’s approach offers a novel alternative that addresses the biotech industry’s long-standing trade-offs between speed, quality, and cost. “There’s like the whole attitude, you know, like cheaper, faster, better — choose two. And you know, a lot of our messaging is like cheaper, better, faster. Why not all three, right?”
By combining its immune organoid technology, robotic automation, and a service-based business model, Parallel Bio aims to deliver faster results, lower costs, and higher quality data compared to traditional animal models. This approach, showcased in its “Clinical Trial in a Dish” platform that was announced in May, has already attracted major pharmaceutical partners seeking to test drug candidates on human models at the earliest stages of development. Moving away from animal testing is not just better for the animals. “It’s just strictly better along almost every dimension to be able to use small human models rather than animal models to do this kind of research,” Gesher explained. “I expect there will be a wholesale migration, even if it’s just to get costs down. You get the ethical side of not destroying animals for free, as well as cleaner, faster results.”
The federal government has signaled its support for alternatives to animal testing for drug development. In December 2022, President Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 into law, which eliminated the requirement for animal testing before human trials in drug development, clearing the way for pharma companies to use alternative methods to assess drug safety and efficacy.
The 3-D building blocks of a new approach to biological research
Ari Gesher
At the heart of Parallel Bio’s technology are repeatable immune organoids — miniature, lab-grown versions of human immune systems derived from the same donor. Unlike traditional 2D cell cultures, organoids are 3-D self-assembling tissue cultures. They allow for highly controlled and consistent experiments, eliminating the variability inherent in animal models or different human donors. “Our core biological technology at Parallel Bio — repeatable immune organoids from the same donor —creates a new kind of biology,” Gesher explained. “We can hold the biology itself constant, controlling for organism effects.”
In principle, organoids offer a level of control is not possible even with cloned lab animals. Second, researchers can precisely manipulate the genetic background of organoids. Finally, the in vitro environment allows for tight regulation of factors like temperature, nutrient supply, and exposure to experimental compounds, minimizing variability and maximizing reproducibility.
While offering significant advantages, organoids have traditionally had some limitations. Inherent variability between organoids and the absence of complex features like vascularization and immune components can affect reproducibility and the ability to fully mimic in vivo conditions.
While offering significant advantages, organoids have traditionally had some limitations. Inherent variability between organoids and the absence of complex features like vascularization and immune components can affect reproducibility and the ability to fully mimic in vivo conditions. But automation can address these challenges by enhancing reproducibility, enabling larger-scale studies, and improving the monitoring and analysis of organoid development. Parallel Bio plans to leverage automation, where robots handle tedious tasks like pipetting and data collection, to enable organoid experiments to run continuously and efficiently, allowing researchers to “do biology at a higher level of abstraction,” according to Gesher. “With automation, that same large experiment or study could be done in three months without ever putting on a lab coat,” he explained, adding that this shift enables scientists to “do more science.”
Ratcheting up biological research quality
Automating experiments could also help address a central challenge in science — the reproducibility crisis. “One benefit of automation is a quality ratchet,” Gesher explained. “When you control your operations and identify areas for improvement, you can steadily enhance quality over time.” By maintaining a consistent experimental setup, researchers can rerun previous experiments and measure the impact of changes on data quality. That can enable iterative refinement that is more challenging with traditional ad-hoc experimentation methods. “Setting up the same experiment years later, potentially with new equipment, introduces significant opportunities for error and inconsistency,” Gesher said.
Automation is a strong path to more reproducible science, Gesher added. “To automate, you must enumerate all operations. There’s no hidden operation, no forgotten step, no need to ‘jiggle the pipette.’ Everything is written in code. […] Automation increases the precision and repeatability of experiments.”
Toward industrializing scientific research
Looking ahead, Gesher envisions a future where organoid research that integrates automation and a service-based model becomes the standard for biological research. “It’s interesting to build this industrialization of science,” he mused. “From an interface perspective, it looks like software as a service. It should have the same ease of integration.” Just as developers seamlessly integrate various software services into their applications via APIs, researchers will be able to incorporate biological services directly into their research pipelines. Gesher also points to the transformative nature of cloud computing, which has led to a sort of Golden Age of software as a service.
Gesher envisions a future where biological research mirrors the transformative impact of the cloud for enterprise companies and consumers. “In computing, we learned that outsourcing operations is beneficial,” he explains. “You no longer need to own a data center, manage power and water, or deal with admins, hardware techs, and networking. It’s all gone. You just get computing power.”
Parallel Bio aims to bring this same level of efficiency and accessibility to biological research. “Similarly, with our product, researchers can simply ask how the immune system reacts to a compound without setting up a lab,” Gesher concluded. “We can answer that question. There are many more questions in this domain that our architecture can address.”
