Data ‘plumbing’ helped get the COVID vaccine ready quicker than most people thought possible.

Automation, along with a cloud-first server environment and collaborative networks, are behind an unusually speedy vaccine rollout for COVID, explains a life sciences data-cloud scientist.

The reason vaccine-maker Moderna Inc., for example, was able to successfully shift gears from sequence to its initial vaccine in 50 or 60 days was because of it, according to Mike Tarselli (pictured), chief scientific officer of TetraScience Inc. The company operates a research and development data cloud for life sciences.

Speed requirements aren’t going away. “That kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to,” he said.

Indeed, vaccines, historically, have taken years to develop, often 10-15 years: One example, the polio vaccine developed in 1954 took scientists almost a year to simply analyze the trial results before it was determined that the vaccine protected people.

In anticipation of the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Thing in Security, AI and Life Sciences — set to kick off on June 16 — Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with Tarselli for a special CUBE Conversation about how TetraScience is disrupting scientific discovery and life sciences by automating the process in the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

A cloud-first distributed model

“We build pipelines,” Tarselli said, explaining how his company is approaching cloud-based scientific discovery. The key to speeding up science is to harmonize the data, he added.

The problem with life sciences R&D, thus far, has been that the data sources need sending to disparate data targets so that they can be worked on. That’s troublesome and time-consuming. The reason being, that all of the involved elements tend to come from different vendors; they don’t talk to each other and have non compatible controls, according to Tarselli. These are serious issues, particularly if you want to crunch numbers quickly.

However, there’s a better, vendor-agnostic way to approach it, according to Tarselli.

“We bring them up to the cloud, or a cloud native solution, we harmonize them, we extract the data first, and then we put it into our intermediate data schema to harmonize it,” he explained.

Use cases

TetraScience’s work for Prelude Therapeutics, a precision oncology firm attempting to target cancer cells, is a case study Tarselli references as one indicative of an integration that benefits from a cloud native, open platform automation model such as TetraScience’s — the company claims it has no direct cloud native and open platform competitor.

In that case, they took a scientific instrument — a liquid handler — that they got talking to the lab’s Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) and screening application and then imported data from an external source. “And do all of that together and merge it so that they could actually see out the other side, a screening cascade, and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days,” Tarselli explained.

Automating elements of chromatography (a mixture separation process used in labs) is a project TetraScience built for diabetes cure pioneer Novo Nordisk.

Global pandemic

The COVID pandemic has been double-edged for TetraScience, though. On the one hand, the pandemic is forcing mass awareness that science development could speed up vaccine development with the right environments and tools. That’s good for the company’s potential growth. However, it’s also been tough because TetraScience has had to go fully remote and adapt to that new reality. It’s using Jira project tracking and GitHub for internal collaboration.

The mix has not been all bad, though, and in fact the pandemic period has been the most successful in the company’s history, according to Tarselli. A lack of “friction from the physical world” has enabled it to concentrate on connections, and so on, including building generic connectors it hopes to sell.

“It can all be done remotely,” he pointed out. “We’re cloud first, cloud native.”

‘Netflix for connectors’

Connectors for sale are a crucial part of the company’s business model. A connector is a process that moves data from one database to another. The process can include transformations to make querying easier, among other structural changes.

“We want to be like a Netflix for connectors,” said Tarselli, referencing the company building a library for all eventualities. “Generic cases in mind.”

The company recently received $80 million in Series B funding and believes it has the resources now to become the go-to source for “every single connector you can imagine.”

Data apps are another area TetraScience intends to grow: “Things that you can use to derive value from your data out,” Tarselli stated.

Bidirectional communications and compliance are areas the company wants to explore because they are ideally suited for a harmonized, central data environment.

“We’re digital plumbers,” Tarselli concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations, and tune in to theCUBE’s live coverage of AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Thing in Security, AI and Life Sciences on June 16. (* Disclosure: TetraScience Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither TetraScience nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE