Matterworks Master Plan, Part One
Biotech is operating in the dark. In the field, we keep engineering cells for many purposes like producing chemicals, modeling disease, and testing drugs, and yet we’re completely unaware of the metabolic state of the system. Metabolism is heavily involved in all of these processes. Operating without knowledge of the cellular metabolism constitutes a major blindspot. This ignorance costs the biotechnology industry time and money. Tens of years and millions of dollars are lost in productivity, preventable dead-ends, and missed opportunities.
The reason for this is that we just don’t have the right tools. At the Broad Institute, where our founders met, all the questions are formulated in terms of genetics, because we know how to sequence DNA/RNA really well. But genomics and transcriptomics are only half the story. This complacency has diverted away from the second half of the story, metabolomics and metabolic flux analysis, which we don’t know how to do well.
We’re here to finish the story. Matterworks’ mission is to make metabolomics of all kinds (targeted, untargeted, labeled, etc.) fast, reliable, affordable and ubiquitous
So we don’t have to keep operating in the dark.
