CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Foray Bioscience has launched Pando, an intelligent research and development workspace designed to help plant scientists manage plant culture research, protocols, experimental design and laboratory operations from a single platform.
The Cambridge-based plant production company said Pando combines what it describes as the world’s largest structured in vitro plant knowledge base with AI-powered research tools, protocol infrastructure and lab operations capabilities.
Foray said the platform is already being used in academic and commercial settings to accelerate plant culture experimentation and production while building biological intelligence over time.
The company said plant research and development remains highly fragmented, with critical knowledge scattered across academic papers, spreadsheets, PDFs, lab notebooks and institutional memory. That fragmentation can slow development of new plant products, crop varieties, medicines, materials and conservation-related applications.
Plants underpin roughly half of global GDP, according to Foray, but more than 350,000 land plant species exist and only about 2% have been meaningfully studied in vitro. The company said developing plant culture workflows can require managing more than 40 interacting variables, often forcing researchers to start from scratch.
“Translation of new plant products and crop varieties, from lab to market, hinges on successful in vitro workflows. Today, more than 70% of these projects fail due to the extreme complexity of protocol design: A single production process depends on more than 34 individual variables, which would require a boggling 17 billion experiments and more than 2 billion years to fully explore,” said Ashley Beckwith, founder and CEO of Foray. “The future of plant production requires turning plant knowledge into predictive models that improve the odds of success, learning and improving over time. This is exactly what Pando supports, equipping organizations with the data and infrastructure to make plant knowledge translatable and compounding, so plant innovations no longer have to begin from zero.”
Pando is intended for organizations working in plant propagation, bioengineering, biomanufacturing, research and conservation. Foray said customers use the platform to design and perform protocols and experiments more efficiently, improve institutional knowledge sharing, support junior staff and achieve successful in vitro protocols more than three times faster.
The platform allows users to access an in vitro plant knowledge base, compare media formulations, build and share media and protocols, receive support from an AI plant expert, manage biological collections and team tasks, and design statistically sound experiments. Foray said future capabilities will include predicting and scoring protocol performance before researchers begin lab work.
Foray said it uses Pando internally to develop bioproducts, including fabricated seeds, and to support plant biomanufacturing workflows.
