BenchSci Blog

Built by a team of scientists, BenchSci was developed with one thing in mind: to help you quickly and easily identify published data that support the use of antibodies.

But did you know you can do much more than that?

In this article, I want to highlight 7 features of BenchSci to maximize your search.

Let's begin!

Ever been frustrated failing to reproduce a key study? Well, unfortunately you’re not alone. In fact, a recent Nature survey found that approximately 50% of biomedical researchers were unable to reproduce their own, or someone else’s, findings. Research antibodies, in particular, contribute much to this irreproducibility.

To address this "reproducibility crisis" in biomedical research, we hosted a symposium at the University of Toronto on Aug 16, 2017, bringing together key opinion leaders and the biomedical research community to discuss how to ensure more reproducible research. A common subject speakers addressed was the importance of antibody validation.

If you’re a biomedical research scientist, chances are you have a unique personal story about using antibodies. Not only are research antibodies one of the most commonly used research reagents (88% of scientists, to be exact), they also play a crucial role in the reproducibility of any groundbreaking research findings.

To date, BenchSci’s machine learning algorithm has decoded millions of Open Access scientific papers and over 3.7 million antibody products. However, OA papers only represent a subset of all scientific literature. Scientists generally use resources like Google or Pubmed, and are missing out on tools and other resources that publishers might offer. BenchSci therefore has initiated talks with publishers to make their content discoverable through BenchSci without a loss of readership or traffic to their sites.

Designing experiments is not an easy process. I can relate, having recently been at the bench myself before joining the BenchSci team. If your lab doesn’t already have an established set of protocols and reagents, then the next best resource is the scientific literature in your field. Not only does it take hours to comb through paper after paper to find exactly what you need, but I’m sure many scientists have experienced the frustration of finding a paper that contained the exact experiment you were looking to perform, only to find that the crucial details for the reagents you need to reproduce the experiment are absent.

It's that time of the month, BenchSci's monthly update!

The idea of BenchSci originated from one person, Dr. Thomas Leung, BenchSci’s Chief Scientist. Read on to find out why he started BenchSci and what he has learned:

At BenchSci, our goal is to help fellow scientists achieve biomedical discoveries faster.

One of our New Year resolutions here at BenchSci is to share our journey with the scientific community. We decided to start with a monthly blog post that will summarize what we have recently been up to.

More than two years have passed since our Chief Scientist, Dr. Thomas Leung, came up with the idea for BenchSci. Today, we are happy to announce that we have officially launched the beta version of BenchSci at 10 universities across North America.