Ready to Read (and Roll?)
We FINALLY have our very own ONT nanopore sequencer to run some experiments. It has taken us nearly 8 months (and tons of emails) to get our hands on the ONT.
When I first laid my eyes on our sequencer, my first thought was gosh isn’t it beautiful? I have never felt about any other electromechanical device (including phones and PCs and headphones that a lot of folks fuss over), and this one is special not just because it reads DNA. It is perhaps the first device that has protein structures interfacing with electronic components, and is the most modular of them all.
Image Description: The ONT nanopore sequencer
Super grateful to Yashas, Anulipi, Saurabh, Kishan and Sachit for helping us with the ONT procurement.
I have a lot to say about how ONT isn’t the best nanopore sequencer out there (although it’s the only company in the world that sells this) and how we need to build our own solid state pores to ensure that flow cells don’t run out so quickly. But that’s for another day. For now we are admiring the gorgeous engineering of our pocket-sequencer (which a good friend described as ‘straight out of a James Bond movie’) and getting ready to run some experiments.
The Home Lab Era
“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
I believe that this quote, while attributed to evolution in nature, also fits in well with the evolution of a company.
We have set up a home lab to run our bio and electronics experiments in tandem. It’s exciting to graduate from having just a bench in an incubator to having an entire (albeit hacky) room to try out experiments, build, break, rebuild and get to our eureka moments. It’s also funny that the first ever fridge I bought is for BioCompute, and not for my home (yeah I do have a long standing debate with friends about why I don’t ‘really’ need a fridge at home).
Video Description: A sneak peak into our home lab
We still rely on the incubator for bigger and more complex equipment but a home lab helps us iterate and get to our POC faster. We hope to be one of the first freaky bio/climate tech unicorns to spin out of a garage living room (but you get the point).
Super grateful to Zayner and the entire ODIN team for helping us source a lot of our equipment and consumables, and for being an all-round inspiration. And to Nitish for lending us a vortex at such short notice.
Image Description: Ajay bidding farewell to the first ever pipette tip used at BioCompute
PCB Design
We are graduating from breadboards to PCBs for our nanopore fabrication circuit. Akanksha is hard at work designing the PCBs, identifying the right manufacturer and getting it out as soon as possible.
Super grateful to Prithviraj Narendra from the Hardware Mafia community for helping us troubleshoot our PCB, and to Anumol Dominic at IISc for sharing a bunch of insights. If you have leads on really good PCB manufacturers in India (preferably Bangalore), do send them our way.
We are also onboarding an electronics engineering intern very soon, stay tuned to meet our new teammate!
Nucleate Activator
This week we received our acceptance to Nucleate, one of the best no-strings-attached biotech accelerator programs in the world
Image Description: The Welcome Email to Nucleate
For the next few months we will be working closely with mentors on different aspects of the company from setting tech milestones to IP strategy, team management and more. Super excited to join this cohort, and grateful to Heer for encouraging me to apply.
Market Deep-Dive
Akanksha and I will be at the launch of the Sustainable IT Center of Excellence in Mysore, where we will be speaking to a range of folks in the data center ecosystem, who look at storage and compute from a sustainability lens.
If you are in Mysore and would like to catch up/have recommendations for what we should be doing in the city (including and beyond networking) hit us up.