Important cell culture information sits nestled in handwritten lab notebooks of stem cell scientists all over the world. That means it’s often inaccessible for sharing with other labs.
“Cell culture work itself is entirely done by manual handwritten methods based on lab method. We literally never found exception to that after talking to hundreds of people around the world,” said Scott Fulton, chief technical officer of Cellara, a Madison startup which was profiled as part of an ongoing series written by UW-Madison students. “All the people doing the research are doing it all by hand. Here’s a big problem, we can solve that problem.”
Cellara wants to reconnect that “missing link” with CultureTrax.
CultureTrax is a software information platform for laboratories that are using stem cell technology. It enables them to plan, execute and document the work they’re doing in the lab around culturing stem cells and other kinds of cells.
“It allows them to share that work without other collaborates with that lab or on the other side of the world,” Fulton said. “It opens up a whole part of the data they’re generating that wasn’t accessible before for discovery.”
According to Fulton, stem cell scientists’ experiments can take anywhere from one to six months to perform, and they use all this “incredible high tech that generates hundreds of gigabytes per experiment.”
CultureTrax’s mission is clear for Cellara. Read the full story here.
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