Scientists have always risen to history’s greatest challenges.
In the early 1950s, Rosalind Franklin worked under strict limits: scarce equipment, tight funding, and restricted lab time. Yet those constraints forced her to refine her methods with unprecedented precision, producing Photo 51, the image that unlocked the DNA double helix.
Modern academic science is facing its own constraints: shrinking budgets, hiring freezes, and smaller lab teams. The instinct is often to scale back. But that mindset risks missing the deeper opportunity.
A key question in today’s environment isn’t “How do I slow down until resources return?” It’s, “How do I keep pushing discovery forward with what I have today?”
In times like these, the right tools can make all the difference – helping labs maintain momentum, uphold rigor, and stay focused on discovery.
Accelerating Multi-Omics Research
Via Foundry, our flagship bioinformatics platform, is the orchestration layer for biological super-intelligence – where multi-omics, AI, and real-world evidence converge into a unified intelligence fabric. It transforms how science gets done: accelerating discovery, ensuring reproducibility, and turning complexity into clarity. With Foundry, researchers can move from idea to insight without the friction of coding, DevOps, or IT overhead. Every workflow is streamlined, every dataset is FAIR by design, and every result is traceable and shareable.
Until now, enterprise-scale bioinformatics and AI capabilities have been out of reach for most academic labs – limited by cost, complexity, and bureaucracy. Access meant waiting: for grants, contracts, provisioning, and IT support. Foundry EDU changes that – bringing cloud-scale power, reproducibility, and AI-driven intelligence directly to the bench, so science can move at the speed of discovery.
Today, Via Scientific is officially opening Foundry EDU, giving academic labs immediate access to the full Foundry platform through simple self-service sign-up. Researchers can take command of their science and run complex, reproducible multi-omics workflows in minutes, even under the tightest resource constraints.
AI-guided assistance, interactive tutorials, and prebuilt templates make it simple to get started, while labs maintain full control from day one. For teams working with limited resources, that support isn’t a luxury, it’s essential.
Foundry EDU: A Case Study - Lean Funding, Bold Science
At UMass Chan, the Garber Lab is leading the VIGOR project, asking one of the hardest questions in autoimmune research: why do some people suddenly develop diseases like vitiligo while others, with the same genetic risk, never do?
Answering it takes ambition: assembling a nationwide cohort of 1,000 participants, collecting saliva, blood, skin, and interstitial fluid through at-home kits, layering in surveys every three months and samples every six. Over years, this grows into an immense corpus of biological and clinical data that must be tracked, merged across modalities, and analyzed with rigor.
Here’s the surprise: it’s all run with just one bioinformatician.
That’s the Foundry EDU difference.
Every kit is barcoded. Every dataset is centralized. Every pipeline is version-controlled. Foundry EDU manages not just raw data, but the layers of metadata that make it searchable, reproducible, and FAIR by design. Innumerable bioinformatics pipelines can be orchestrated, re-run, and adapted as methods evolve, ensuring that insights keep pace with science.
What once felt like handcrafting data now operates like infrastructure. Instead of drowning in logistics, the team spends its time interrogating biology and advancing discovery.
Get Immediate Access
Now, academic labs can start using Foundry EDU in minutes. The platform empowers teams to move quickly from data to discovery, maintaining pace and rigor even under tight constraints. Instead of waiting on contracts or setup, researchers can focus on what matters most: advancing their science.
Constraints have always been part of science, but they don’t have to hold research back. Just as Franklin turned limitations into legacy, today’s academic labs can transform lean budgets into bold science.
Foundry EDU delivers the speed, affordability, and scalability needed to thrive in challenging conditions. It’s the complete Foundry platform, optimized for the realities of academic research.
We’re proud to support the academic community in turning constraints into breakthroughs.
%20landscape.png)
