Synthace

Synthace is a life sciences software and expert services company dedicated to helping discovery biology teams run more effective, revealing, and powerful experiments in less time and at lower cost. With over 20 years of combined expertise, Synthace combines its digital experiment platform with hands-on specialist support to help drug discovery and assay development teams cut time to insight, reduce project timelines by months, and make breakthroughs that were previously out of reach.

Synthace serves R&D teams across the life sciences industry — including organizations such as AstraZeneca, Ipsen, Oxford Biomedica, Virica Biotech, and Innocent Meat — providing both the software infrastructure and the scientific expertise needed to design, automate, and scale complex multifactorial experiments across discovery biology functions.

The Core Problem Synthace Solves

• Assay development and similar discovery biology functions require running large numbers of experiments with many different variables, making them inherently difficult to automate and scale to high throughput.
• Constant delivery pressure prevents scientists from adopting smarter experimental methods, causing teams to default to older, slower ways of working and extending project timelines.
• In-house tools built to streamline processes often backfire — they are difficult to use, maintain, and adapt, ultimately consuming the resources they were meant to free up.

How Synthace Helps: Software, Training, and On-Site Support

• Synthace provides a combination of software, scientist training, and dedicated on-site specialist support to give discovery teams a smarter, faster approach to experimentation.
• The company's Field Application Scientists — including specialists with backgrounds in molecular biology, assay development, high throughput screening, synthetic biology, and bioinformatics — become extended members of customers' in-house teams, lending decades of experience while scientists retain control of their own projects.
• Specialists such as Ross Kent (Global Manager, Field Application Scientists, PhD in Synthetic Biology from the University of Manchester, with experience at Syngenta, the University of Manchester, and Royal Dutch Shell) and Erika Wiseman (Field Application Scientist with over 17 years of experience across Kalypsys, Dart NeuroScience, King's College London, and Scripps Research) work directly with customer scientists to implement multifactorial methods and automation into live projects.

Engagement Model and Deployment Approach

• Synthace begins by identifying and delivering a small number of high-impact starter projects, allowing customers to validate the approach against their own science before broader rollout.
• The team then helps one discovery group adopt tried-and-tested methods for designing experiments with many variables, and shows scientists how to automate those experiments using Synthace's software.
• Over time, Synthace scales this approach organization-wide across drug discovery teams, building self-sufficiency so that teams continue to generate faster, more definitive results independently.
• Synthace uses the scientists and liquid-handling dispensers already present in the customer's lab from day one, meaning there is no waiting period to realize value — results are visible from the first experiment.

Platform and Software Capabilities

• Synthace's software platform enables scientists to represent even the most complex and sophisticated experiments in a digital, standardized, cloud-based format.
• The platform structures scientists' approach to experimentation, producing reliable, consistent outputs that support better go/no-go decisions across drug discovery programs.
• Synthace integrates with liquid-handling dispensers already in use at customer sites, creating a path to standardized experimental insight without requiring new capital equipment.
• The company has explored integration of its platform with AI tools, including a successful integration with ChatGPT as a step toward enabling AI-assisted scientific experimentation.
• Synthace supports multifactorial and multivariate experimental design methods, enabling scientists to extract more insight from fewer experiments.

Customer Outcomes and Testimonials

• Customers report that Synthace has fundamentally changed not only how they run experiments, but how they think about and communicate science — as noted by a Principal Scientist at AstraZeneca.
• Virica Biotech reported a greater than tenfold increase in experimental throughput, alongside strong customer support and education from the Synthace team.
• Oxford Biomedica's Senior Director of Innovation noted that Synthace enables scientists to do things that were previously impossible.
• Ipsen's Senior Director of Research highlighted that Synthace makes it routine for scientists to move away from manually creating 24–48 constructs, freeing them to focus on higher-value tasks.
• Innocent Meat's CTO credited Synthace's expertise and commitment as instrumental in optimizing processes and products in ways that would not otherwise have been achievable.

Company Background and Culture

• Synthace was founded on the question of whether even the most complex biological experiments could be represented digitally and standardized in the cloud — a question the company has been answering ever since through its platform and customer work.
• The company operates across four countries, serves customers in nine countries, and employs a team representing over 25 nationalities speaking 19 different languages.
• Synthace's leadership team brings multidisciplinary expertise spanning biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science, combined with deep experience in the technology industry.
• The company runs and optimizes its own experiments in its own lab, using its platform internally to inform how it develops and improves the product for customers.
• Synthace has been recognized as one of the best workplaces in UK tech by Great Place to Work UK.
• The company is backed by world-class investment partners with deep life science expertise.

Synthace participates actively in the life sciences community, including events such as ELRIG Advances in Cell-based Screening in Drug Discovery and SLAS Europe, reflecting its ongoing commitment to advancing the field of discovery biology and laboratory automation.