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Mission

LabDAO's mission is to accelerate progress in the life sciences by making scientific tools more accessible.

We want to live in a world in which the ability to unleash one's scientific potential is not bounded by limited access to funding opportunities, infrastructure and distribution channels. We build tools that are designed to lower the barriers for inventors to raise funding, develop their technologies and distribute them.

TLDR: We want to live in a world in which students drop out of school because they have developed a therapeutic candidate from their laptop, not yet-another instant checkout app.

The Problem

Open source code has accelerated progress in information technology over the last 20 years. This success is enabled by the ability to share code at low cost and to reproduce results with high reliability. In addition, the sharing of code is accelerated by technology market dynamics in which intellectual property is less relevant than the ability to execute, time to market, and trade secrets around implementation.

In contrast, open source in biomedicine is still waiting for its moment. The high cost of reproducing life science processes and the low reliability of generating expected results has slowed down progress. In addition, sharing instructions is hampered by intellectual property and trade secrets, the primary mode of defense against competitors during the lengthy regulatory approval processes seen in the life science industry.

While cloud compute providers have removed the barriers to execute code by moving hardware online, there is no comparable layer of abstraction for dry-lab and wet-lab tools in biomedicine. We believe that an open source exchange for dry-lab and wet-lab tools could (1) help reduce the high costs created by secrecy around biomedical tooling, (2) increase reproducibility of biomedical tools, and (3) foster the emergence of independent entities that maintain open source tools.

The Solution

To accelerate progress, we enable scientists to share their specialized tools and services with eachother easily. Instead of going through a lengthy search for collaborators or service providers, researchers can discover tools and projects on an open exchange.

  • by creating an open exchange of wet-lab and dry-lab tooling
  • by defining standards around biomedical tools to increase reproducibility and transparency
  • by incentivizing contributors to develop applications and provide instrumentation

Abstracted infrastructure, such as cloud computing, has lowered the upfront cost of starting a new technology company. Similarly, we are convinced that such abstracted infrastructure in biomedicine, both in the dry-lab and wet-lab domain, can facilitate growth of new life science companies.