Pairwise Accelerates Food and Tech Innovation with Python and Dash Enterprise

Introduction

Only one in 10 American adults consumes the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables. Pairwise, a U.S. mission-driven food tech startup, wants to address this problem by discovering genetic traits that make these foods healthier and easier to eat.

By accelerating innovation in the produce aisle with bioinformatics and molecular sequencing pipelines powered by Python and Dash Enterprise, Pairwise is preparing to bring new brands of tastier, healthier, and more consistently available produce to market.

Challenge

Driven by their mission of building a healthier world through better fruits and vegetables, Pairwise identified the need for their teams of highly skilled geneticists, molecular biologists, and software engineers to create a solution purpose-built for their innovative product portfolio.

The 5-year-old company turned to Dash Enterprise to enable a seamless partnership between its experienced scientists and its bench of tech applications. These mission-critical scientific processes are complex and challenging to scale at a rapidly growing company.

Three core pillars drove Pairwise to Dash Enterprise from its previous, bespoke applications platform:

• Demand for 24/7 functionality: Critical automated processes must run reliably and require robust back-end infrastructure, security, and support. Pairwise wanted to focus on the scientific problems and outsource these industry-standard features to Dash Enterprise.
• Scalability limitations with open-source: R Shiny was commonly used for developing Pairwise’s previous data applications, but as data sets increased in size, memory limitations of R Shiny blocked the efficient delivery of insights.
• Full-stack development with one language: Pairwise sought to enable its Python engineers to deliver insight across scientific and human processes, and at the business level, while avoiding traditional full-stack development workflows.

Solution

Using Dash Enterprise, Pairwise’s software development team created four applications to support their genetic screening operations from end to end. This molecular identification step is key to Pairwise’s fast-paced innovation pipeline because it identifies the effect of Pairwise’s technology in creating new products. As their experiment needs scaled, Pairwise’s teams worked to integrate liquid handlers alongside their manual laboratory processes as a form of digital labor. They developed a Dash app that seamlessly integrates human and scientific processes and hardware interactions to go back and forth. This enabled a transition to automated processing from 5% to 80% of their total scientific effort.

As Pairwise developed novel experiment types, their teams needed a way to ensure they were delivering to each specification. These specifications included sequence-specific designs and categorization for experimental groups. By front-loading this experiment traceability across teams, they enabled easy translation of experiment intent and design to data creation and analysis.

Results

Investing in Dash Enterprise as the platform for scientific analytics workflows has vastly increased the pace of innovation at Pairwise:

• Single-language full-stack development: Dash synchronizes back-end and front-end development for Python engineers traditionally relegated to back-end data manipulation. Pairwise has seen this efficiency across each of the 20 applications deployed in a year.
• 10x experiment acceleration: Dash apps written in Python integrated easily with lab bench hardware and enabled more plant samples to be processed — 3TB worth of data each week.
• Transition of automated processing from 5% to 80% of total scientific effort by building and deploying a data app to integrate human and scientific processes.
• 5x team growth: Increased demand for analytics tools from the R&D organization demonstrated ROI to company leadership, leading to greater investment in the Pairwise software development team.
• 10x customer reach: Built-in authentication and app management capabilities empowered the small software development team to deliver analytics tools to a much larger internal R&D organization of over 100 employees.
• 7x acceleration of data quality review: A built-for-purpose Dash app provided a transparent, intuitive interface for experimental data quality signoff and review, reducing data review times from 2 weeks to 48 hours while ensuring experiments received 100% accurate data.
• 20-minute styling: The built-in Dash Design Kit enables developers to bring applications into compliance with internal branding guidelines in minutes — no CSS required.