Vyriad needed an ELN that didn’t take a year to set up

Vyriad’s Process Development team needed an electronic lab notebook (ELN) they could use straight away, without spending a year configuring it. Since February 2026, Lab Thread has brought their experiments, calculators and projects together in one place. New users need minimal training, two team members moved the team’s entire back catalogue of studies across themselves, and Darren Phung, Principal Scientist, now manages every project from a single view.

Complex manufacturing requires meticulous record keeping

The Process Development team at Vyriad manages the highly complex, multi-stage manufacturing workflows required to bring their innovative therapies to life. Every project involves an intricate series of steps that move seamlessly from early-scale cell cultivation to large-scale bioreactor production, followed by sophisticated purification and advanced quality testing.

“Because these processes are so technically demanding, we implement a rigorous, end-to-end sample tracking system at every single phase of development. This meticulous oversight allows us to monitor critical data in real-time, maintain flawless traceability, and ensure the absolute safety, consistency, and potency of every material we produce.”

Implementation needed to be quick and easy

Before Lab Thread, those records were spread across paper notebooks, Word documents and Excel. Word documents had no reliable timestamps and didn’t connect to the team’s other tools, and supporting files were harder still to keep together. For a single transfection, a folder might hold the protocol, a transfection sheet, several calculators and the results, “scattered around everywhere in that folder.” Samples were tracked in Excel with the team’s own naming system, following each sample through five to seven aliquots to its test results. The team had tried a dedicated sample tracking system, but it took a long time to set up and still wasn’t a good fit.

That experience set Darren’s main requirement for a new system: it had to be ready to use.

[The deciding factor] “For R&D and process development, an ELN has to be easy to use. A lot of systems need a long time to configure to the level you want. Before you can really use the system, you take another year or so just to set it up, which is a waste of our time, especially if you don’t have a full-time employee to build it. We needed something that was ready to use, with minimal set up.”

Getting up and running required minimal training

The team started using Lab Thread in February 2026, on the recommendation of Chief Scientific Officer, Kah-Whye Peng. “What hooked us on Lab Thread is that it’s pretty easy to use,” says Darren. “It’s straightforward for us, so we’ve stayed with the system ever since.”

The ELN is now home to all the team’s experiments, from bioreactor checklists and control parameters to monitoring data. The calculators that used to sit in separate files are now uploaded into the notebook entries they belong to, “so everything is in one place.” As the team works with more constructs, they also use Lab Thread’s molecular biology tools to check each design and include it in their protocols, which Darren says helps them “avoid miscommunication.” The team is now setting up inventory, equipment and room locations too.

That ease of use has made adoption simple. The whole team works in Lab Thread, and new users needed minimal training to get started.

“There are five of us, and we’re all using Lab Thread. New users needed minimal training.”

It also shows in how the team brought their history with them. Two team members took it upon themselves to move all the team’s previous studies into Lab Thread too. There was no dedicated migration project and no outside help: two scientists found the system straightforward enough to take on the job alongside their own work. The result is a complete record, with past and current studies side by side, so earlier results are as easy to find and compare as today’s.

Managing every project from a single view

For Darren, the biggest change is in how he monitors the team’s progress. He previously ran projects in separate project management tools that sat outside the team’s scientific records. Now he uses Lab Thread’s project management features and Gantt chart view, alongside the experiments themselves.

“As a project manager, I have a big-picture view of everything, and I don’t have to switch between different software, so it saves me time and effort. It also helps with communication. I can just show my boss my whole workspace in Lab Thread and they can look around inside. That saves a lot of communication effort as well.”

As one of Lab Thread’s first users, the PD team has also helped shape the platform. Critical time points are central to how the team documents its protocols, so Darren asked for a way to record time intervals in the ELN. Lab Thread’s team built it, and the Vyriad team now use that feature routinely in their notes. That responsiveness is something the big software companies they’d used before couldn’t offer: “a feature that doesn’t work for us won’t change for us.”

“The one thing I like the most about Lab Thread is how interactive we are, and how quickly changes are made. I like that Lab Thread has a small team, with very close interactions.”

Darren describes Lab Thread as “an almost ready, plug-and-play ELN system”, and the team plans to stay with it. “We’re definitely planning on keeping Lab Thread.”