Making labs smarter for scientific breakthroughs

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from Labiatek. I'm Dylan Kysain, and this is episode 196 for the podcast. Today, we dive into the future of lab management with Ryan Cavewood, CEO and cofounder of Labthread. Ryan's journey spans groundbreaking work in viral therapy and gene delivery during his at Oxford to founding Oxgene, a cell and gene therapy innovator acquired by Wuxi Advanced Therapies in 2021. We'll explore the frustrations of fragmented lab tools that inspired Labthreads integrated digital solution combining ELN, LIMS, molecular biology, and collaboration in one seamless platform. We'll uncover how it boosts reproducibility, ensures compliance, and free scientists up to innovate. I hope you enjoy Ryan's insights on evolving digital workflows and accelerating breakthroughs in the lab. Ryan, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Thanks, Ellen. Nice to be here. Ryan, walk me through your career in biotech starting from the time when you were over there in Leeds. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, before before the career in biotech, there was the career in academia. So, I started my, undergrad in Leeds in genetics, then moved down to to Oxford, did a PhD there, in virology and and oncology, finally sort of moving into the gene therapy space. So, yeah, that was the the sort of academic career. And then, I think perhaps rather naively, immediately after finishing the PhD, I decided start my my first biotech knowing absolutely nothing about business or or how to run a company. So, yeah, that was that was kind of a kind of a baptism of fire, to be honest. You founded Oxgene and you were there for for a decade. You must have learned a plenty during that time. Time. Yeah. Absolute absolutely. And and, I'm not I wouldn't necessarily condone the methods that I used in the sense there was a lot of YouTube videos, a lot of, scouring the Internet to try and figure out, you know, how do you understand balance sheets, cash flow forecasts, and legal legalese associated with investments. But, yeah, I ran that company for for ten years as the CEO. We grew the company, to probably about a 110 people. We sold the business back in, back in 2021. So, yeah, it was a it was a long journey. It was a fun journey, but certainly learned a huge amount, along the way. I mean, there's a lot to learn on the business side, and and that can be frustrating, but there must have been frustrations there in the lab too because these were first generation digital tools who would have been using, ELNs, LIMS, software for molecular biology. That must have been a bit frustrating too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very, very frustrating, to be honest. And I need to and you sort of take us back to to 2031 when I started the company. The company was doing a huge amount of genetic engineering, and, I had to basically manipulate large amounts of sequences. And there …