Thrive Bioscience: Data and Analytics that Drive Healthcare

Thomas Forest Farb-Horch

Co-Founder& CEO

Thrive Bioscience provides instruments and software for consistently growing healthy cells with accompanying data and analytics. Located in the Boston, MA area, the company offers its customers a family of instruments and software that provide imaging, analytics, and automation for reproducible cell culture.

Biotechnology has found millions of applications in people every day lives in the present era. The world is evolving at unprecedented rates, and no less is the pace of advancing technologies. Biotechnology is helping humans to take healthcare to a whole new perspective, and with the right support of apt technologies, we will be able to further level up the healthcare field. The research in the field of biotechnology have proven the need and possibilities for further advancements. By setting their foot in the right direction, Thrive Bioscience provides instruments and software for consistently growing healthy cells with accompanying data and analytics. Located in the Boston, MA area, the company offers its customers a family of instruments and software that provide imaging, analytics, and automation for reproducible cell culture. Their products empower biologists by combining microscopy, robotics, and software to acquire, organize, and analyze images of their cells.

Cell Culture and stem cell culture are core research tools necessary for basic research and the development of curative therapies, but cells vary significantly in quality across laboratories with high rates of mislabeling, cross-contamination, and stress. Thrive Bioscience’s unique solutions increase the speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness of drug discovery and basic research while enabling the delivery of new therapies through improving the cell culture and stem cell culture processes. While Current tools do not collect images and data along with tools that enable users to visualize outliers, CellAssist provides comparable data over time that allows for identification of outliers.The CellAssist time-lapse imaging enables the lineage of candidate colonies to be tracked to a single starting cell. Moreover, The CellAssist’s high resolution stacks of images, with highly accurate registration across scans, enabled the characterization of cell morphology without disturbing the cells and colonies.

The CellAssist is the product offered by Thrive Bioscience. It replaces the time at the inverted microscope to acquire, organize, and analyze images of all the cells in SBS format plates. The CellAssist is setting new standards for reproducible cell culture in numerous applications while giving confidence in the cell culture process. The CellAssist automatically builds a database of images, metrics, and methods, and materials to ensure centralized capture and retention of data and set new standards for reproducible cell culture in numerous applications. The CellAssist captures images at up to 60 focal planes, each 5μm – 50 μm apart (user selectable) and with barcodes to identify plates and reagents, thus maintaining a complete centralized record of growth and behavior of all cells. The CellAssist’s documentation, colony counting curves and examination of images are used to characterize the number of colonies for each condition, and the results are collated and easily compared across conditions.

Thrive Bioscience’s yet another offering is EvalCore, a computer workstation at the heart of the CellAssist’s visualization and analysis capabilities. It can be placed in the laboratory or office to automatically download all of the images from the CellAssist instrument. The CellAssist software analyzes the images and presents a comprehensive and coherent view into all of the images and metrics from the entire history of all of the laboratory’s projects. In addition, the whole plate setup information, normally entered the CellAssist tablet can also be entered into Evalcore and automatically transmitted to the CellAssist instrument.

Thrive Bioscience recently conducted an interview with Steven Sheridan, Ph.D., Senior Research Investigator, Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital. During this interview, Steven Sheridan provided an in-depth overview of how the CellAssist addresses his laboratory’s cell culture pain points. Specifically, how to empower biologists with superior image resolution, excellent registration across multiple scans, and a centralized database to capture consistent and shareable images, methods, and materials to support reproducible cell culture research.

With an extensive patent portfolio, the company has been collaborating with internationally recognized researchers in large pharmaceutical, academic, and independent research organizations. These collaborations have resulted in the CellAssist, the first of a family of products for enabling reproducible cell culture.