Hannah Le - the Head of Product of LatchBio (Photo provided by the figure mentioned in the article)
By understanding how these biological elements interact, researchers can decipher disease mechanisms, identify potential drug targets, and develop life-saving therapies. Yet, despite the promise of bioinformatics, many scientists struggle to extract meaning from the overwhelming flood of data generated by modern sequencing technologies.
The challenge: A data tsunami beyond human scale
To grasp the scale of this challenge, consider this: biological data surpasses the combined volume of all texts, images, videos, and even astronomical data. Every experiment can generate terabytes of information—far beyond what most labs can store, let alone analyze efficiently.
But sheer data volume is not the only obstacle. The computational power required to process these datasets is immense. A striking example is AlphaFold, the Nobel Prize-winning software that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences. AlphaFold has revolutionized structural biology by making accurate protein-folding predictions in hours—something that previously took years of laboratory work.
However, running AlphaFold is not trivial. It requires setting up a specialized database, distributing computational tasks across multiple machines, and leveraging high-performance GPUs to process results. A single run can take a full day on powerful hardware, making it inaccessible to many scientists without access to specialized infrastructure.
Data storage, computing power, and the complexity of orchestrating cloud-based analysis pipelines have become bottlenecks. Many of the most powerful bioinformatics tools remain out of reach for the scientists who need them most—the biologists and researchers who have the domain expertise to interpret results and make groundbreaking discoveries.
Enter LatchBio: A California-based series A startup solving the data deluge in Bioinformatics
LatchBio was founded to remove these technical barriers and make advanced bioinformatics tools as accessible as a click of a button. The platform provides a one-stop cloud environment where scientists can store, process, and analyze massive biological datasets without needing DevOps expertise or expensive hardware.
By abstracting away the complexities of data infrastructure, LatchBio enables biologists to focus on what matters: running their analyses, testing hypotheses, and making discoveries. The company’s solutions range from automated bioinformatics workflows for sequencing data to GPU-accelerated computing for AI-driven applications like AlphaFold.
Meet Hannah Le: The Vietnamese product manager shaping the future of Bioinformatics
From an early age, Hannah Le was fascinated by the intersection of biology and technology. Growing up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, she excelled in academics, earning top honors in the Tran Dai Nghia Middle School for the Gifted before ranking valedictorian in the entrance exam for High School for the Gifted in 2015. But her ambitions extended beyond traditional classrooms. She moved to Toronto, Canada to further pursue her passion for research, immersing herself in scientific discovery.
While still in high school, Hannah became the youngest researcher at the Davidson Lab and the Westwood Lab at the University of Toronto, working alongside PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Her work focused on anti-CRISPR proteins, a groundbreaking technology aimed at preventing off-target effects in CRISPR gene-editing therapies—a critical innovation for safer genetic medicine. She also conducted research on aging mechanisms, using fruit fly models to study how scientists might extend human healthspan and lifespan.
Her interest in computational biology deepened when she joined the Computational Core at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), where she helped build a database for rare genetic variant discovery. This tool allowed doctors to quickly search and interpret rare genetic mutations, expediting diagnoses and potential treatments for children with rare diseases. Her contributions led to a publication in the journal Human Mutation.
From researcher to product leader: Scaling Bioinformatics
In 2022, Hannah Le joined LatchBio as its first and sole Product Manager. Just two years later, she is now the Head of Product, leading a team of 10 engineers while working closely with go-to-market and customer success teams. Her mission? To scale LatchBio into the industry’s leading platform for accessible bioinformatics software.
Hannah’s background in both biotechnology and product management uniquely positions her at the intersection of science and software. She understands the challenges faced by researchers firsthand and translates those needs into products that democratize access to high-performance computing for life sciences.
We sat down with Hannah Le to discuss how LatchBio is transforming bioinformatics and accelerating drug discovery and therapeutics breakthroughs.
- What inspired you to join LatchBio as the product lead?
Hannah Le: I saw firsthand how difficult it was for biologists to work with large-scale sequencing and imaging data. Many groundbreaking tools exist—like AlphaFold, single-cell RNA sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics—but they require expertise in cloud computing, pipelines, and GPUs. I wanted to bridge that gap and make these tools accessible to every scientist.
- Can you tell us about the product advancements made at LatchBio and how it’s advancing the industry?
Hannah Le: At LatchBio, we’re building tools that help scientists go from raw data to biological insights as quickly as possible. The journey of scientific analysis can be broken down into five critical steps: data storage, metadata organization, processing, analysis, and visualization.
Each of these steps presents unique challenges—whether it’s the burden of cloud infrastructure, slow compute times, or the steep learning curve of bioinformatics tools. That’s why we built LatchBio to streamline the entire process, integrating all five components into a seamless, intuitive platform:
Latch Data → Unlimited storage, designed like macOS Finder but infinitely scalable.
Latch Registry → A tabular metadata system that organizes files intuitively, linking data to patients, diseases, and experiments.
Latch Workflows → A Python-based toolkit that lets scientists upload scripts and instantly generate a user-friendly interface for automated processing.
Latch Pods → A scalable compute environment with Jupyter and RStudio pre-installed, so researchers can analyze data interactively.
Latch Plots → A visualization engine that combines scientific computing with an intuitive UI, allowing for rapid figure generation.
By unifying these elements, LatchBio drastically shortens the time from data generation to discovery—from months to days, or even hours.
These innovations are already reshaping how biotech companies operate. ElsieBio, a machine learning-driven drug discovery startup (acquired by GSK), leveraged LatchBio to scale its computational workflows. Meanwhile, AtlasXOmics, a pioneer in spatial epigenomics, processes terabytes of ATAC-seq data on Latch to generate detailed scientific reports for their customers.
- What do you think the future of bioinformatics looks like?
For the longest time, biology worked like this: you had a hypothesis—maybe this gene affects this disease—and then you spent weeks, sometimes months running experiments in the lab to test it. Slow, tedious, and often a dead end.
With the rise of single-cell seuqencing, spatial transcriptomics, and AI-driven analysis, scientists can profile every single RNA and DNA molecule in a cell—all at once. Instead of starting in the lab, they can open their laptop, run computational analyses, visualize interactions, and test hypotheses before ever picking up a pipette.
This doesn’t replace the wet lab—it makes it faster and more targeted. Scientists can zero in on the most promising experiments, cutting months off the research cycle. In the end, this means faster drug discovery, better treatments, and breakthroughs at a scale we’ve never seen before.
A new era for Bioinformatics
As biology becomes more data-intensive, the need for accessible, scalable, and user-friendly bioinformatics platforms has never been greater. With leaders like Hannah Le shaping the future of LatchBio, scientists worldwide can harness the power of advanced computational biology—without needing expertise in cloud computing.
By breaking down the technical barriers in bioinformatics, LatchBio is accelerating the next generation of discoveries in genomics, proteomics, and drug development. The future of precision medicine may well be shaped by platforms like these—where science, data, and computing converge seamlessly.
Mai Khanh
