Building the ERP a five-person organoid lab runs on
Design a system for a specialized biotech startup that's structured enough to support branching manufacturing processes and flexible enough to let them experiment when they want to, and make it feel like a breeze to use. Keep track of everything that happens every single day.
Background
Intero Biosystems grows miniature human organs from stem cells (so, just your average business). This is a complex process involving dozens of materials, multiple growth paths, and careful traceability over 30+ days.
While Intero has multiple well-structured manufacturing paths, they also experiment with different reagents and timing sequences. As a startup, they need to have the flexibility to continuously improve the manufacturing and freezing process for their product.
The problem
There aren't any ERPs out there tailor-made for organoid production, so Intero relied on a combination of spreadsheets, plate notes, and whiteboards to keep track of everything.
While manual systems allowed them necessary flexibility, they weren't a scalable solution for a lab that requires careful traceability. Intero needed a system that they could grow with.
The process
While we're not planning to go into organoid production anytime soon, it was critical that we deeply understood the manufacturing and growth process so that we could replicate it in their system. The discovery period spanned several weeks and involved careful mapping, with a number of shared SOPs developed between Intero and Relay. These SOPs helped Intero clarify their own process internally, and we baked them directly into their application.
Every organoid on any given day needs different treatment. We built logic into the system that shows Intero what needs feeding the second they log into their system and what the next step in the growth process is. It's more-or-less a souped up task management system with ERP traceability baked in.
No matter how complicated the underlying system is, the user experience has to feel painless. We built a handful of automations that make key assumptions about each daily log so that 80% of the time a feed is just one button click. Users can peek under the hood to adjust lots used and add feed notes accordingly.
The outcome
Intero received a digital lab book to track organoid production through four distinct phases, with built-in branching at key moments in the production process. Now they have a dashboard for every experiment at every stage, offering complete visibility into lab operations. For each experiment, they can see a complete traceability log of media lots used from the start of growth to the moment of freeze. It's a system with their identity that offers them years of runway.
Highlights
Intero can look at an ingredient lot and see every organoid that used it, or they can look at an organoid and see every ingredient lot used. These are both essential pieces of information for their internal team and their buyers.
Like humans, organoids eat 7 days a week. But we like our weekends off, so we don't want to spend them making onerous logs. We dramatically sped up the logging process to make weekend work just a quick stop at the lab.
Intero uses a Dewar for cryogenic storage of their media lots. A table representation of that inventory doesn't cut it. We built a custom interface that mimics the Dewar's design so that Intero can see where each vial is stored.
Who built it
Reading about a fixed process is fine. Having one is better.
Thirty minutes with someone senior, and an honest answer about whether we are the right team for it.