November 19, 2023

We’re working in stealth on a new startup called Tracer. I wanted to share more about the journey, the “why” behind it and the product. It’s a new observability service that helps bioinformaticians understand if their genomics software is working well and how to make it better.

The initial objective is to cut the time spent on resolving bioinformatics errors by 75% within 2 years. This will be achieved by introducing a new type of UI to enable rapid error resolution, streaming realtime events and matching them with a comprehensive error database. The longer term plan for Tracer is to build out features to solve day to day software engineering problems throughout the biotech lifecycle. From tracing genetic payloads in the lab to simulating 20,000 litre bioreactors in the factory.

This is because the overarching purpose of Tracer is to accelerate the transformation of society with biology. It is estimated that during the next 10-20 years, programmable medicine can address 45% of previously incurable diseases and that 60% of global manufacturing output can be shifted toward sustainable biological processes.

Critical to making that happen is an effective DevOps infrastructure tailored to biology. Unfortunately biology software is complex, error prone and extremely tedious to set up. This is because it is often written by scientists without a traditional software engineering background. As a result, more than half of bioinformaticians’ time is spent debugging common issues. This current state is holding back entire spaces of innovation.

That is why we are building an enterprise-ready observability platform that is able to handle even the most distributed systems in the pharmaceutical industry. Tracer is secure, scalable and streams logs in realtime. It has powerful search and built-in connectors for common bioinformatics tools, frameworks and platforms. Development of Tracer will start in early 2024 and is being co-designed with a growing group of innovative beta users working on cell & gene therapy applications.

Advances in genomics provide hope about cures for previously untreatable genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis and certain types of breast cancer. By making programming in genomics easier, we can help scientists accelerate that timeframe. That’s why we are super excited, and not just about what we are doing today, but Tracer’s potential tomorrow, or the next year or the next twenty years.