About
People
Robbie Oppenheimer Chief Product Officer
Overall Goal
Centralize data and improve traceability
Approach
Commit to utilizing full range of Labguru’s offering
Results
- 350+ hours saved per month
- Data centralization has boosted research efficiency and reproducibility
Robbie Oppenheimer
Chief Product Officer
Loam Bio is on a mission to increase farmers’ soil health and productivity while helping them reduce their climate impact. What started in 2011 as research into soil at the University of Sydney has grown into a successful series B startup that raised AUD 105 million in 2022.
"It’s been an exciting journey since the early days when we discovered the potential of carbon-stabilizing fungus"
Now spread across Australia, US, Canada, and Brazil, their passionate team have developed carbon-sequestering microbes that remove up to 5 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per hectare. These microbes play a key role in helping farmers increase soil carbon while boosting crop yields.
As Loam Bio’s focus shifted from research to commercialization, they needed a better way to run their lab, advance their research, and analyze their results. We sat down with Robbie Oppenheimer, Chief Product Officer at Loam Bio, to learn how they’re leveraging Labguru for all these things.
Challenges
Before Labguru, Loam Bio were documenting their laboratory research without an electronic lab notebook (ELN).
“It was incredibly hard to find who owns what, what changes were made when, and what was the source of truth”
Without a dedicated software tool, managing data across multiple experiments and protocols was a daunting task. For example, when developing a microbe to sequester soil carbon, they needed to check that the fungus was compatible with other chemicals it would encounter on the farm. To do this, they needed to pool together and analyze different chemistries on multiple fungi strains - an impossible task if experiments are on multiple different files.
“We had a big mess of files that was incredibly difficult to navigate”
Traceability was also a big challenge for Loam Bio. With the goal of producing microbes commercially, method repeatability, batch tracking, and quality control were critical to the operation.
After analyzing several options based on cost per user, integration capabilities, ability to analyze data, and other factors, Loam Bio onboarded with Labguru in 2022 and haven’t looked back.
Solution
Loam Bio turned to Labguru as a solution to their data management and organization challenges.
They use Labguru’s datasets to aggregate vast quantities of data from different experiments and protocols, and even link datasets back to the sample itself for a deeper layer of tracking and analysis.
“You can pull all the data from multiple experiments into a single dataset, and that is really valuable”
According to Robbie, this is his team’s favorite feature - they’ve used large datasets to extract phenotypic information from large microbial libraries and analyzed results with a new level of ease and convenience.
Of course, being able to manage this microbe library within Labguru made things easier. It also broke down silos between different departments, with bioproduction teams able to make strain requests from Loam's microbial library within the software.
As a startup, Intellectual Property is a crucial part of their portfolio. With Labguru, everything they do is tracked and can be traced back to the source. As a result, researchers can comprehensively document methods and protocols, allowing them to easily translate them into patents down the line.
“You know who signed what, who witnessed what and when, giving you confidence that it can be reproduced”
Being able to “sign off and witness” experiments has really been a game-changer for Robbie and his team.
“It has added a whole new level of confidence to our work in terms of research integrity and validation”
Results
By making full use of Labguru’s offering, Loam Bio have seen significant improvements in efficiency and productivity, both when it comes to carrying out research and managing their lab. The platform's centralized data management has allowed the team to streamline workflows, made it easier to track changes, and ensure data accuracy.
With an organized inventory, Loam Bio tracks over 500 samples each month, using them across the 100+ monthly experiments that they run through Labguru.
The Storage feature has also made day-to-day lab life easier for their team. They store and process more than 1000 stocks monthly, with the module allowing team members to know the exact location and status of each stock within the lab, detailed down to the exact box and slide it sits in.
In an industry where time is money, Labguru is helping them save both. By having protocols, conditions, and experimental details pre-populated within Labguru, the days of sifting through files and papers are in the past – a few clicks gets them exactly what they need.
“Across our teams, Labguru saves us 350+ hours each month if we consider the productivity and efficiency gains we’ve made”
An Eye to the Future
Loam Bio envisions a future where it continues to lead the way in sustainable agriculture through innovative microbial products, powered by data-driven research.
They hope to become the leading company within their niche, create products that are easy-to-use, and continue recognizing the potential of fungi products for farmers.
To achieve these ambitious goals, Loam Bio is excited to bring even more library and sequence data onto Labguru.
“We’re excited to continue using the bioinformatics and dataset capabilities and see how far the platform can take us”.