Future-Proof your Benchling Platform: Evolving at the Speed of Science

Science and technology are evolving rapidly, with an explosion in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) creating new possibilities for scientific discovery, operational efficiencies, and the development of novel products and therapies. However, many organizations often struggle to keep pace and leverage these advances due to reliance on legacy technology landscapes. Discover several strategic approaches to ensure practical, sustainable, and meaningful scientific and technological evolution of your Benchling platform.

What is Benchling?

Benchling is a cloud-based, life science software platform for research and development (R&D). The software is an interconnected set of applications for end-to-end documentation of experimental data. The notebook (electronic lab notebook) acts as the main gateway for user engagement and collaboration within the platform, allowing users to simultaneously capture unstructured and structured data. Structured data capture in the notebook is mediated using Benchling Registry, which acts as a centralized database to track organization-relevant entities and associated results, and Benchling Inventory, to manage the physical inventory of entities. The workflows module allows structured, repeatable hand-offs and tasks to be managed, assigned, tracked, and documented. The platform also hosts a range of molecular biology tools, including support for DNA and RNA workflows, and some small molecule features. Recently Benchling has acquired support for in vivo studies, released functionality to enable bioprocess workflows, and advanced their instrument automation capabilities.

As all these capabilities are built on a single platform with an underlying centralized database, all data, irrespective of which user captured it, is collated in a searchable and structured manner. Users can leverage the insights application for real-time analytics, driving data-driven decision making. This structured database is achieved by using schema, that can be established and changed by an organization through point-and-click actions. Given this, the Benchling data model can readily be altered to align with the evolution of an organization.

Strategic thinking

While Benchling can be easily adapted to changing needs through point-and-click configurations, these alterations must be strategically implemented. Your organization’s data governance committee should consider the following when planning any changes to your Benchling platform:

Thoroughly evaluate user requests to determine whether a new entity type or workflow should be established or if existing entity types or workflows can simply be modified to include additional metadata.
Harmonize terminology, such as drop-down lists, and ensure the consistent use of these structured terms rather than free text fields to empower searchability and robust data collation.
Prioritize long-term solutions rather than a short fix, where the entities and workflows are designed to enable future growth and are not overly restrictive.

Each of these considerations, especially the last, would benefit from an assessment of the organization’s current technological ecosystem and scientific and operational processes (from Benchling and beyond) to identify bottlenecks and gaps. This ecosystem can then be overlaid with the organization’s future aspirations from an operational, scientific and technological standpoint to establish a digital road map that can enable these goals to be met.

Scientific evolution

Over the past decade, science and technology have boomed with the establishment of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, mRNA vaccines, and Quantum computing, to name but a few. Many of these advances have revolutionized how biotechnology companies do science. For example, CRISPR-Cas9 has enabled organizations to conduct gene editing far more robustly and efficiently. As a result, the life science industry must not only take advantage of these technologies in conducting day-to-day tasks, but also ensure that technology-based systems and software align and support this. Benchling has developed various tools to help support this evolving biological landscape, with the ability to design, visualize and capture DNA, RNA, and biological conjugate molecules. Many of these advances in Benching tools or functionality are released to customers that already license the relevant modules. Leveraging these innovations through new feature deployment and end-user training maximizes return on investment with the Benchling platform.

Operational evolution

Maximizing return on your Benchling investment also requires continual evaluation of how your operational processes are supported by the software. At regular intervals (typically between 6 months to a year) an organization should review the processes and workflows that are active in Benchling. The goal is to determine if there are any bottlenecks or areas for improvement. The system configurations should be adjusted based on this.

The insight module is key in this evaluation. It can identify how long a particular workflow task may take to be executed, how many users are using one or more notebook templates, or how many users are active on the system. Decisions to alter your Benchling workflow, templates, and data model, should, like any good research, be data driven and evidence based. Benchling end-users are valuable in this context too. Survey them during this time to determine if the system aligns with their operational workflows and where they are identifying challenges, successes, and new opportunities with the system.

Organizational evolution

Organization change. Teams and departments are formed, expanded, and/or undergo restructuring. These changes impact more than the names on the payroll, it frequently impacts how work is conducted, as well as the processes used and responsibilities. This, in turn, will affect how effective your current Benchling configuration is. Additionally, employee turnover in the life science sector in the USA is high: 20.6% in 2020 (Aon, 2020), with 45% of these resignations amongst employees with a tenure of less than 1 year (Aon, 2020). Due to all these changes, organizations should take time to consider:

System support and maintenance. Ensure that system support and maintenance is stable, occurring consistently despite user change over. Ideally each team should identify more than one person who can act as a super administrator on the platform; and that all configuration and data governance information is formally documented, to ensure smooth transitions during handovers.
Training.
1. Incoming employees must be robustly trained in Benchling, using standardized training protocols. Note that the Benchling configurations will vary from organization to organization, and therefore all new users, regardless of their familiarity with Benchling, should be trained in your system.
2. Existing users should be provided with refresher training. This is particularly important for standard and best Benchling practices, such as documenting results in structured Benchling tables as opposed to uploading an attachment to a notebook entry. Additionally, as new features are rolled out on the platform, existing users need to be trained to ensure adoption.
Ongoing support. Irrespective of whether a Benchling user is new to the organization or has been around for years, identifying change advocates and incorporating ‘Benchling best practices’, ‘what’s new’ and ‘ask the expert’ lunch and learn sessions (which can be recorded and shared after) are powerful mechanisms to align the organization with the evolving platform.

Benchling Evolutions

The Benchling platform has expanded in terms of functionality over time, including expansions of lab automation capabilities and molecular biology tools and the establishment of new functionality to support bioprocessing and in vivo studies. The value of these expansions, however, can only be realized by an organization if they are adopted, where relevant. Organizations should:

Keep track on what is being released by Benchling by attending their new webinars, connecting with their Benchling sales representative, and/or Benchling or third-party system support team.
Assess these capabilities in line with the organization’s growing requirements and digital blueprint. This includes both the generation of specific requirement sets and viewing the new Benchling features or functionality via a demonstration.
Where relevant, an organization should adopt new capabilities to ensure continually and maximum return on their Benchling investment.
Participate in the Benchling Community (https://community.benchling.com/), which enables users to share and discuss best practices across the industry.

Benchling Consulting

The above outlines several strategies to future-proof your Benchling environment. It may seem daunting, but ProPharma is here to help. We offer a variety of services that can help to sustain, improve, and evolve your Benchling platform, including:

requirements gathering and generation of a digital blueprint (a long-term road map for your technological success)
support and establishment of data strategy and governance including data standards
Benchling managed services, that range from template and workflow creation, data model refreshes, and custom training.

No matter the size of your organization or the complexity of your science, we are hands-on partners that can ensure the successful evolution of your Benchling platform. Contact us today.