Case Study: ElevateBio achieves thousands-per-week NGS throughput and accelerates cell and gene therapy R&D with Benchling

Going digital to accelerate cell and gene therapy research and development

ElevateBio, a Waltham-based biotech focused on accelerating cell and gene therapies, faced major infrastructure bottlenecks: fragmented, one-off tools and manual record-keeping that limited throughput, obscured sample traceability, and made it hard to spot inefficiencies early in R&D. These challenges threatened scale and slowed progress across viral vector, RNA, and cell therapy programs.

Implementing Benchling as a central ELN integrated with a database, inventory, workflows, sequence analysis, and instrument connections standardized data capture, eliminated paper notebooks, and automated data flows. As a result, the NGS core scaled from processing hundreds to thousands of sequences per week (peaking at ~7,000), scientists regained time for lab work and analysis, and full sample traceability and earlier bottleneck detection increased the likelihood of successful development.

ElevateBio

Cherylene Plewa

Senior Vice President Cellular Engineering