Magna Labs Inc. is a woman-owned, Washington D.C.-metro based scientific software development company with a mission to accelerate the innovation and delivery of precision science & medicine by empowering scientists to build and test bioinformatics tools with ease. Founded by a former Illumina bioinformatician and engineer in 2020, Magna Labs’ mission was inspired by years of observation that the bioinformatics tool development field was struggling to adopt conventional software development processes and technologies that have proven to be efficient in driving massive growth, acceleration and quality improvement in software applications. By providing scientist-friendly, data-centric DevOps and test automation tools, Magna Labs is bridging the gap between bioinformatics and software -- cutting down an estimated 30%+ of bioinformatics development time and ensuring high quality development at scale, so that bio-software teams can deliver accurate, reliable, and timely results.
What is the problem?
Across the biotech industry, bioinformatics and computational teams are building software without a safety net. The highly complex, high-risk software pipelines that these teams develop can directly impact (or harm) human health, and require accuracy-based, stratifiable testing on real, synthetic, and simulated datasets throughout development, optimization, and translation to commercial or clinical applications. Each algorithm change has the potential to break downstream integrations, impact the sensitivity/specificity balance, or cause unexpected results. Quality management is therefore critical, but unfortunately is tedious, expensive to implement, and requires cross-functional expertise and continuous maintenance. Our automated testing and benchmarking platform integrates directly with existing development workflows to check accuracy and reproducibility with every code change, so that these teams can bring safer products to market faster.
What is their solution?
Our cloud-based quality management and automation platform, Miqa, enables bioinformatics development teams to continuously test their analytical pipelines for accuracy, reproducibility, and robustness. Each new pipeline version is automatically run against a variety of data from reference standards, in-house samples, and simulations to assess its performance and stability. Miqa processes the results of these runs to generate rich validation reports that can be used in CI/CD, release and design-history documentation, risk and impact assessments, and optimization studies. Unlike conventional test automation, Miqa’s unique query-based architecture enables deep flexibility to compare across any version or data property, powering longitudinal dashboards, on-demand analytics, data segmentation, and interactive troubleshooting and visualization – all in a shareable platform that hooks directly into existing development tools and workflows, enabling teams to innovate with speed and safety.
