Spore.Bio’s Post

I’m celebrating my one year at Spore.Bio ! 🥳 Let’s be honest what we are doing is fancy : amazing labs, big customers, shiny fundraisings… But it’s also hard. At Spore.Bio, we decided to show what’s behind the curtains and inspire others. To put things in context, you need to know that our machine detects bacteria, and we need to test it on as many micro-organisms as possible. To do this, we're building up the largest collection of microbial strains in our lab. 🦠 When we purchased our first strains, we encountered the ultimate nightmare for microbiologists: widespread contamination 😱 Our first instinct was to start all over again. We changed operators (I promise I'm not that bad at this), switched culture media, replaced agar plates, disinfected from floor to ceiling - basically, we started from scratch 🔄 The result: contamination still there (see, I told you it wasn’t my fault). After some investigation, we discovered the strains we received were already contaminated... damn 💀. And when you're on a tight schedule like ours, you really don’t want that, especially since it doesn't just impact us microbiologists, but also the optics and data scientists who are waiting for our results. No need to panic, we've managed to adapt, reschedule and keep things moving (because we don’t have time to waste ⏰). Our to-do list is as long as my arm, so we had no trouble figuring out how to keep R&D going while we were waiting for new (uncontaminated) strains. In the end, we didn’t change our approach. Yes, our schedules are tight, and they'll stay that way, but they're also flexible, because that's what's important in R&D. And that’s how we've become good at negotiating (Right, Marine Pottier, PhD?), and above all we've changed suppliers - lesson learned ! 😛 Oh btw, we're hiring, come struggle with us, it's fun ! 🎉