Watertown, MA, July 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cultivarium, a bioengineering firm that helps pioneering labs harness the extraordinary power of the microbial universe in record time, today announced the launch of beta access to its new AI-powered lab assistant — PRISM (Protocol Recording for Improved Scientific Methodology). The platform's AI engine transforms captured audio and video into automatically-generated lab protocols, bringing to life real-world experimental documentation that can be shared with collaborators across teams, departments, and institutions. “So much of what actually happens during experiments in the lab is lost — whether that's methodological insights, specific techniques or on-the-fly adaptations,” said Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium. “PRISM captures science as it actually occurs in the lab — the failures, the adjustments, the intuitive decisions that experienced researchers make without conscious thought — and aims to define a new kind of documentation workflow so scientists have the knowledge and tools they need to explore the microbial universe at scale.” PRISM users wear glasses that capture both audio and visual data. As they execute their experiments, users narrate their actions and call out key observations that inform the protocol. PRISM's cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) transform this multimedia data into a step-by-step, shareable protocol, highlight missing details, and synchronize the video with each step of the process. Users can then leverage AI suggestions to edit and fine-tune the final product for a comprehensive portrait of the protocol in question. The result is a detailed multimodal protocol that others can read, listen to, and watch to see how an expert handles each step. For example, viewers can better understand a certain protocol's pipetting technique, or what contamination looks like in a specific experimental context. The AI-powered lab assistant helps enhance knowledge sharing, training, cross-collaboration, and, in the future, even laboratory automation. “Scientists often travel to expert labs to learn the tricks that you can't get from a published protocol,” said Cultivarium Chief Scientific Officer, Nili Ostrov. “We've built PRISM to help researchers share their work, and to reduce the time and effort to reproduce scientific protocols. We invite community collaboration to make PRISM better.” Cultivarium is committed to equipping scientists with the tools they need to power breakthrough research and scale up exploration of non-model microbes. For that reason, PRISM is now available for a limited beta cohort of collaborators and co-developers to provide input and feedback to refine the tool and best meet the needs of the scientific community.
To learn more about Cultivarium, and to sign up for the private beta for PRISM, visit cultivarium.org.
ABOUT CULTIVARIUM
Cultivarium is a bioengineering firm that helps pioneering labs harness the extraordinary power of the microbial universe in record time. Proudly based in Boston, MA, we are working tirelessly to catalyze a flourishing bioeconomy that heals our people and planet.
To learn more, please visit: www.cultivarium.org
Heather Stafford Cultivarium 443-848-8617 heather@jones-dilworth.com