Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sridhar Iyengar, CEO of Elemental Machines (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on MedTech labs. How exactly does your product play in that environment?

Sridhar Iyengar: What we’ve seen in the last 10 years or so is that there’s been a tremendous acceleration of biotech and life science startups. Much more than the decade prior to that. One of the specialties is this field called synthetic biology. It’s basically what we used to call genetic engineering 20 to 30 years ago. Genetic engineering with a whole new set of tools and a whole new set of computational systems that we can bring in AI techniques to.

In the pre-clinical research phase, there is a tremendous push and need for data unlike any time before. Forget the scientists for now. Let’s talk about the people who support the lab operations – technicians, lab managers, IT managers. For the scientist to run good models, they need data from everything.

We have customers who say, “We need to know not only the data from the machine, but also things like when was the machine calibrated. We’re seeing differences between machine A and machine B. Also different machine locations give different results.” That level of scrutiny wasn’t there 10 years ago. The data scientists are cross-correlating and finding sensitive differences between different procedures and protocols. There’re a lot of unknowns. All these folks have to collect and present this information in a way that they can do computation on.

The analogy that I make for my friends who are in the pure software industry is, there is an entire field of DevOps. It’s a hard field. It’s hard to find a good DevOps engineer these days. You go back to 10 to 20 years, the people doing DevOps now were called SysAdmins. These were the folks you never really saw. They were in a windowless basement. You only approached them when things went wrong.

With the advent of cloud computing and other tremendous amounts of third-party tools, the system administrators had to expand and grow into an entirely new field called developer operations. That’s what we’re seeing in life sciences. The lab managers are growing into lab operations managers. They have to deal with getting the data into the cloud so scientists can access them.

What about information security and encryption? What about interoperability? There are instruments that these people use that are 15 years old. How do you even get data from these machines? Even today, data is manually written down on paper and then typed into Excel. Lab operations is going through this transformation where the need for data is outpacing the technology support.

Sramana Mitra: Architecturally, how is your product deployed in a lab setting? Is it a bunch of sensors that are on machines? Is it software installed on machines?

Sridhar Iyengar: We’re a hardware-enabled SaaS system. We pull data off of machines, instruments, and environments. All of that goes to the cloud. There’re two different modes of operation. One is just straightforward sensors. These are sensors that are relevant to life science work – temperature, humidity, air pressure, light levels. Our devices are called Elements. Element A is ambient. It has temperature, light, and humidity built into it. We have one called Element T for temperature. That’s for extreme temperatures – -200 to high temperature ovens. We use those for when the instrument doesn’t have any output and we need to understand what’s happening.

The most common example is controlled environments like cold storage. In the last year, cold chain and cold storage has come to the fore. All of a sudden, my friends who don’t know about this industry are saying, “How can freezers fail?” For machines and instruments in an environment that don’t have built-in sensors, we have our own boxes.

The other mode of operations is we do have a digital interface. We can plug into machines and instruments, pull data from them directly, and put it on the cloud. The whole idea is, we have hardware – whether it’s independent sensors or just an analog interface – we can plug into third-party machines and sensors. It’s all wireless. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sridhar Iyengar, CEO of Elemental Machines
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