Shiru: Accelerating lab protein discovery by 3x with Superblocks

Shiru, an Alameda-based company, uses machine learning, bioinformatics, and precision fermentation to create functional, sustainable ingredients for the plant-based industry. As demand grows, Shiru scales its operations to identify new proteins rapidly. The team evaluates thousands of proteins, requiring internal tooling for data analysis, visualization, and collaboration. Superblocks helps build applications to track high-throughput protein screening results across multiple dimensions. This enables lab scientists to quickly analyze protein expression and identify the best candidates for further testing. Shiru's Data Scientists use Superblocks to create user-friendly UIs with frontend drag and drop components connected to backend Snowflake and Postgres databases. The platform supports writing Python directly in the editor, allowing for data manipulation and visualization using libraries like Pandas and Plotly. As a result, Shiru has adopted a data-driven mindset, improving efficiency in understanding key results from screening experiments and moving protein candidates through the testing pipeline.