Introducing Tracer (Part 1)

January 21, 2024

We’re working in stealth on a new startup called Tracer. We wanted to share more about the product, the journey so far, and the “why” behind it. Tracer is a single platform that helps bioinformaticians understand if their genomics software is working well and how to make it better.

The initial objective is to cut bioinformaticians’ time spent on resolving errors by 75% within 2 years. We do this by building a new type of user interface that enables you to resolve errors quickly, visualize realtime logs and debug easily with a curated error database. The longer term plan for Tracer is to build out features that solve daily software engineering challenges across the biotechnology lifecycle — from tracing genetic payloads in the lab to simulating 20,000 liter bioreactors in the factory.

Tracer’s key purpose is to accelerate the biology revolution in society. It is estimated (opens in a new tab) that in the next 10-20 years, programmable medicine can address 45% of previously incurable diseases and that 60% of global manufacturing output can be shifted toward sustainable biological processes.

Critical to making that happen is an effective DevOps infrastructure tailored to biology. Unfortunately, software in digital biology tends to be error prone, extremely tedious to set up and time-consuming to maintain. At the same time, existing cloud providers like AWS do not have user interfaces designed for the intricate nature of genomics tooling and biology data types.

As a result, over half of bioinformaticians’ time is spent debugging common issues instead of driving innovation. This status quo is holding back biotechnology advancements that could accelerate programmable medicine and sustainable processes in manufacturing.

That is why we are building an easy-to-use observability platform that is able to handle even the most distributed systems in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. Tracer is secure, scalable and streams logs in realtime. It has powerful search and built-in connectors for common bioinformatics tools, frameworks and platforms. Development of Tracer will start in early 2024 and is being co-designed with a growing group of innovative beta users working on gene & cell therapy and diagnostics applications.

Advances in genomics and sequencing technologies provide hope to cure previously untreatable genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis and certain types of breast cancer. By making programming in biology easier, we can help scientists accelerate that timeframe for such life-altering discoveries. Therefore, we are super excited, and not just about what we are doing today, but Tracer’s potential tomorrow, or the next year or the next twenty years.