Foray Bioscience launches Pando platform to boost AI-native plant research tools
In Massachusetts, Foray Bioscience announced the launch of Pando, an intelligent workspace and operating system for plant culture. By combining the world’s largest structured in vitro plant knowledge base with AI-native research tools, protocol infrastructure and laboratory operations, Pando allows plant scientists to search, structure, manage, share and generate plant culture knowledge from a single platform. Already in use across academic and commercial environments, the platform accelerates plant culture experimentation and production, and scales valuable biological intelligence over time.
As the foundation of food systems, materials, medicines and natural ecosystems, plants underpin roughly half of the global GDP. However, the infrastructure supporting plant research and development is highly fragmented and underdeveloped. Critical plant knowledge remains scattered across academic papers, spreadsheets, PDFs, lab notebooks and institutional memory that is difficult to search, standardize or operationalize. Complicating this reality is the biological challenge itself: There are more than 350,000 species of land plants, yet only ~2% have been meaningfully studied in vitro. As a result, growing anything from the cell up, which can involve more than 40 interacting variables for a single plant culture workflow, often requires starting from scratch, which significantly increases development timelines, costs and failure rates.
Pando supports organizations working across the full lifecycle of plant propagation, bioengineering, biomanufacturing, research and conservation. Customers use the platform to save time designing and performing protocols and experiments, improve institutional knowledge sharing and retention, level up junior staff, and achieve successful in vitro protocols over 3X faster. Pando also enables users to:
· Access to the world’s largest in vitro plant knowledge base
· Surface unique insights across plant taxa, or rapidly compare media formulations from across sources
· Build and share media, protocols and products with embedded data standards
· Receive project support from a locally-adapted, AI plant expert
· Manage biological collections and tasks across teams
· Design statistically-sound experiments
And soon: predict and score protocol performance before setting foot in the lab
Foray bridges plant biology, AI and biomanufacturing, and works with partners to shave years off the path from lab to field. The company leverages Pando internally to build bioproducts like fabricated seeds.
Category: Fuels
