Health IT, Startups

ZappyLab joins Berkeley accelerator as it raises $1.5M for life science protocols tools

Life sciences company ZappyLab, which develops mobile and Web-based tools to support life science researchers, […]

Life sciences company ZappyLab, which develops mobile and Web-based tools to support life science researchers, and created a social network for research scientists has joined Skydeck Accelerator. The accelerator works with the University of California at Berkeley entrepreneur community. The move comes as ZappyLab’s founders shift the company into a new phase with the expansion of a life science protocols platform for which it’s in the process of raising $1.5 million, according to an amended Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Co-founder Lenny Teytelman responded to emailed questions from MedCity News. Asked why it opted for Skydeck, the answer I receive makes it sound like a no-brainer. The free and beautiful space the office occupies in downtown Berkeley is in the penthouse of the tallest building in the city where Intel Labs used to be. There’s also the advisers, mentors and investor connections. Skydeck is funded by UC Berkeley and doesn’t take equity. It can also use  university resources to recruit interns and employees.

Asked what kinds of milestones the company hoped to reach with the fundraise, Teytelman said it wants to “implement the key functionality on Web and mobile devices for protocols, continue seeding the repository with popular protocols, grow the user base on protocols, and get the crowdsourced annotations going.”

Earlier this year ZappyLab raised $54,000 from a Kickstarter campaign aimed at scientists to support its science protocols channel Protocols.io (that’s the video from the campaign embedded above). Teytelman said the company has started to work with vendors to bring high-quality science protocols to the channel. A glance at the site reveals protocols from NEB and Addgene, for example. He added that a recent update of the website “now allows forking/copying any protocol, modifying it, and “running” it with all changes recorded in the cloud-synchronized journal.” He included an explanation of how that would work:

“It … helps create an instant lab notebook snapshot of exactly how the method was performed on a particular day. This is 90 percent of what we record in our paper lab notebooks now, and our platform makes this digital and importantly easy.”

He added that it now works the same on the Web, iOS and Android networks. It also wants to bring the protocols channel to Google Glass in the future.

Skydeck is affiliated with the biotech incubator QB3 which counts UC Berkleley, University of California at San Francisco and University of California at Santa Cruz as members. ZappyLab is one of several life science startups at Skydeck. Among the others are: Cortera, which designs medical devices to change the way incurable neurological conditions are treated; Privail wants to develop simple and affordable point-of-care diagnostic devices for early detection of infectious diseases; Eko Devices, a medical device company which is developing, among other things a stethoscope accessory that works with a smartphone app to amplify, visualizes, record and share heart sounds; Nodexus, a company started by Lydia Sohn focuses on cancer screening. Sohn’s lab at UC Berkeley has developed a way to screen for cancer cells that have been shed from breast tumors and are circulating in the blood, posing the risk that they’ll develop satellite tumors, called Node Pore Sensing; and Zephyrus Biosciences.

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