Benchling and Moderna Collaborate on AI-Driven Research

SAN FRANCISCO and BOSTON, May 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Benchling, the R&D platform powering the biotech industry, today announced an expanded collaboration with Moderna. What began with Benchling supporting Moderna's technical development teams — such as analytical development, technical operations, process development, and formulations — has grown into a broader rollout across the company's research organization. The expansion will bring hundreds of Moderna's scientists onto a unified, AI-ready research and development digital platform built to accelerate discovery and innovation.

"Moderna was built on the belief that technology and science together drive breakthroughs in medicine," said Wade Davis, Senior Vice President, Digital at Moderna. "AI is creating extraordinary opportunities in science, but realizing its full potential requires entirely new ways of working. Benchling is tackling these industry-wide challenges head-on. Through this collaboration, our scientists have access to a strong foundation for AI and our computational scientists and engineers are empowered to do truly cutting-edge work."

A new standard for digital transformation in biotech

Moderna and Benchling are focused on three priorities with this digital transformation: consolidating systems to create a seamless experience for scientists, automating scientific workflows, and standardizing data into consistent, AI-ready formats.

"R&D teams are under constant pressure to move faster and work more efficiently. AI and automation can unlock new levels of productivity, but only with the right infrastructure," said Sajith Wickramasekara, CEO and co-founder of Benchling. "Moderna and Benchling are showing what the future of R&D looks like—fully digital, deeply integrated and built for intelligence and scale."

Innovating the infrastructure for AI in biotech

Moderna's research and technical development teams required a flexible system that could scale with their pipeline. Benchling's digital platform addresses these needs by balancing agility with out-of-the box scientific workflows. Moderna's digital teams use Benchling's developer platform to build and deploy custom workflows, automate template generation, and integrate proprietary machine learning models. This shift reduces setup time for new workflows and enables high-throughput processing of experimental data—allowing digital teams to focus on innovation instead of maintaining systems. 

As Benchling rolls out across the research organization, scientists can design experiments, track samples, and analyze results within a single system, eliminating the friction of disconnected tools. The platform also addresses a long-standing industry challenge: integrating both structured and unstructured data across diverse research environments, laying the groundwork for AI-driven analysis across therapeutic areas.

Through this collaboration, the two companies are redefining how modern biotech research is done, setting a new standard for the digital infrastructure behind AI-driven R&D.