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Asimov Joins the Genesis Mission, Using Boston University's NSF-Backed Cloud Lab to Power Lab-in-the-Loop AI Models
BOSTON, July 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Asimov, the company building an AI-native synthetic biology platform to advance therapeutic development, today announced that it will build out the therapeutic protein capabilities of Boston University's (BU) node in the National Science Foundation's new Programmable Cloud Laboratory (PCL) Test Bed. The PCL Test Bed is a core NSF contribution to the U.S. government's Genesis Mission, the national effort to harness AI for scientific discovery, and represents a $380 million investment across 20 nodes nationwide. The BU node will receive up to $20 million over four years, and will be built around the Design, Automation, Manufacturing, and Processes (DAMP) Laboratory, led by Professor Douglas Densmore, a co-founder of Asimov. Designing biology is still largely trial and error. Unlike other industries, biotechnology haslacked standardized, broadly accessible infrastructure purpose-built to build and test designs at scale, capabilities rarely within reach for academic labs and costly even for industry, so progress depends heavily on each team's own lab and intuition. The cost of this approach is especially high in therapeutic proteins, where promising biologics are often delayed or abandoned because manufacturing liabilities surface late in development, after significant time and capital have been spent. Predicting those liabilities from a protein's sequence would reshape the economics of drug development, but doing so demands large, systematic datasets that require generation capabilities that are hard to access. The BU node is built to bring this capability within reach across academia and industry. Asimov will stand up high-throughput protein production and characterization within the DAMP Lab node, generating experimental data at massive scale. That data will drive a lab-in-the-loop cycle: Asimov will design candidates computationally, produce and test them on the cloud lab, and feed the results back into models that predict manufacturing outcomes directly from protein sequence. As one of the network's first users, Asimov will run this loop end to end. The 20 nodes are built to interoperate, so an experiment can move between labs as it progresses, an idea the BU team calls "round tripping." "The semiconductor industry was completely transformed when chip design decoupled from chip manufacturing. Once a company like NVIDIA could design a processor without ever building a fab, while a foundry like TSMC could manufacture designs from anyone, that separation drove decades of innovation," said Alec Nielsen, co-founder and CEO at Asimov. "Scaling biological science through cloud labs enables a similar ‘separation of concerns’. It democratizes access to the frontier, which is otherwise only reachable through vertical integration and massive investment, putting it out of reach for most." "For academic cloud labs to gain large-scale adoption, commercial partnerships are essential to transition early-stage ideas into viable industrial applications,” said Densmore. “Asimov is building the core operational foundation to make cloud-based therapeutic manufacturing a reality." About Asimov Founded by bioengineers from MIT and Boston University and headquartered in Boston, the company has raised over $200 million from top institutional investors including Andreessen Horowitz, CPP Investments, Horizons Ventures, and Fidelity Management & Research Company. For more information, visit www.asimov.com. Contact 
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