Move From Fractal to Flywheel with The Tetra Partner Network

November 29, 2021

Turn single-function products into multipliers of digital value

Every day, our customers confront a painful question: “What got lost today?” Despite hundreds of tools in their laboratories, they still don’t have what they most need - harmonized and centralized scientific data.  What should be simple, isn’t.  And what is most desirable – having a substrate of harmonized, trusted, and accessible scientific data for advanced analytics – remains elusive.

Our biopharma customers embody the centuries-old tradition of inquiry through the scientific method.  As we all know, the scientific method begins with a question posed by a scientist. From “How can I create substances that can kill certain bacteria selectively without harming other cells?” to “How does the protein spike of SARS-CoV-2 glycosylate?”

Scientists haven’t changed; their tools have (or have they)?

Scientists haven’t changed. However, their tools have. Somewhat. In the 1730s the Culpeper type compound microscope was made of oak with a drawtube covered in green vellum on which were drawn all-purpose focusing lines.

Turn individual products into digital ecosystem contributors. Respond rapidly with cloud-powered solutions for unified assays, workflows, lab functions, or enterprise-level insights.

Today scientists still use pencils to write, not on vellum, but in laboratory notebooks. They want to conduct scientific inquiry using all their tools for discovery, analysis, and decision making, but they can’t. Because that condition presupposes a coherence of scientific data whose source, today, primarily resides incoherently in hundreds of heterogeneous data formats, or even on paper.

That incoherence is the root cause of the loss of momentum in drug innovation and delivery. It prevents passage into a new world of automated laboratory science where scientific inquiry is unleashed, new assays or workflows can be created immediately, and advanced data visualization, analytics, and AI/ML are routine.

Yes, but…can a single tool really solve a root cause problem?

Just as scientific data are fragmented, so too are the leading vendors that support the biopharma industry. Without a means to unify and harmonize data, without a globally trusted and scientifically-focused data standard, the proliferation of individually brilliant but disconnected tools is head spinning. Where is all this going? It looks like a fractal. A mathematically certain, infinitely repeating pattern of ever-increasing complexity.

Shall we throw our hands up in despair and continue adding to the complexity? If not, what kind of change is realistic? After all, each vendor, reliably outstanding in their chosen field, is a specialist provider of unique products and scientific data formats that often reflect decades of accumulated knowledge, development, and financial investment.

Every partner added to the Tetra Partner Network creates incremental value for customers.

To rephrase Albert Einstein, “You can’t solve an original super problem without a new, super mindset.”  We’d add, “You can’t create a new data-driven world for scientists without industry supplier superheroes using a scientific data super platform.”

The scientific data super platform is the TetraScience R&D Data Cloud. Its superpower is to create a substrate of the highest quality possible of engineered scientific data - for many purposes, from data liquidity between instruments and applications to advanced data science and AI/ML. It’s an open platform, the only one purpose-built for scientific data, and open platforms create abundance for everyone in their ecosystems.

The Tetra Partner Network (TPN) is the collaborative mechanism by which leading life science industry vendors create data fluidity for their customers.

We’ve done all the heavy lifting in creating the open platform and engendering a robust ecosystem of scientific collaborators, of customers and vendors. When Tetra Partners access the power of our R&D Data Cloud, they unlock value multipliers for their products while continuing to focus resources on their core brilliance.

The Tetra Partner Network is the collaborative mechanism by which suppliers create valuable, monetized digital products that deliver data fluidity to customers.

Let’s replatform our thinking

If we, as an industry of leading life-sciences vendors, replatform our thinking about how we could deliver added value to scientists through partnership, then together we could accelerate delivery of life-enhancing and life-saving therapeutics.

A note of gratitude for our partners: we wouldn’t exist without you. We have enormous respect for each partner and hold no allegiance beyond the data itself, which belongs to the customer. We call the fluid data “Tetra Data,” which means it’s of the highest quality, engineered for global adoption. It’s how our industry will add velocity to the drug pipeline.

The change won’t happen overnight, but we can start today.  We’re expanding the TPN as a result of surging requests from both customers and partners to accelerate movement to our R&D Data Cloud. We’re honored to receive that level of trust. Our partnership models offer all industry vendors a means to create valuable, monetized, and co-developed digital products:

Integration Partnership  

What role does your current product play in laboratories? We can help you expand the value of its data – make it fluid - by engineering it for scalability within the larger customer data ecosystem. Think of desired use cases and workflows for advanced and routine analysis.

Strategic Partnership

Do you see opportunities to develop use case collaboration for common customers? We provide pull-through revenue models with strategic partners and deliver co-marketing activities.                                    

Commercial Partnership

Do you envision creating new value from one-point instrument software?  Do you want to deploy a more robust informatics product much more quickly?  We offer a variety of Commercial partnerships.  For example, we can automate workflows and provide a library of scalable integrations for informatics providers. We can create a data agent inside instrument software that allows customers to see things never possible before from an existing installed fleet.

Mind Crafting with Science and Data

The TPN is led by us - Simon Meffan-Main, Ph.D., Vice President of Product, and Alan Millar, Ph.D., Vice President of Business Development. We’re scientists who’ve worked in labs.

We spent decades of our careers developing instrument hardware and software, and SaaS solutions. The products we created are used in labs around the world. We solved a lot of customer problems, but never the original super problem. The solution architect for our super mindset is the co-founder of our company, Spin Wang, who dared to ask, “Why can’t all this R&D scientific data be integrated and harmonized?”

We resonate with the TetraScience spirit of, “Why not?” Our job is to mind craft mutually-beneficial partner models, using our scientific, cloud, and data science expertise. We see opportunities for collaboration – everywhere. We think it’s extremely cool and simultaneously deeply humbling to be active protagonists moving our industry from a fractal to a flywheel of valuable, monetized, jointly developed digital products.


We hope you’ll join us.

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