MiLabs Launches Platforma: Bridging the Gap Between Biology and Bioinformatics

By Allison Proffitt 

May 8, 2025 | For many years, Stan Poslavsky applied his Ph.D. in theoretical physics to work in quantum theory. But when he switched to work in immunology, he noticed the need for better computational software for biologists. So he developed a software platform.   

"For years, working in this field, we've constantly seen this pain between biology people and data analysis," Poslavsky explained. Biologists conduct their planned experiments, and they want to get results from the data they generate. But sequencing data is big data, requiring IT skills to process. “The people who do the biology are unable to get the answer independently,” Poslavsky observed.  

MiLaboratories began its journey with MiXCR, a software for processing next-generation sequencing data for T-cells and B-cells, first released in 2013. Published in Nature Methods (DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.3364) in 2015, the software has become the industry standard, processing over 10 million samples in the past seven years and used by more than 1,000 organizations daily, including government agencies like NIH and FDA, Poslavsky said. MiXCR is available open source to the academic communities.  

This was Bill Van Etten’s introduction to the company. Van Etten, co-founder and senior scientific consultant at BioTeam, was researching immunology tools for a BioTeam client. He hoped to choose the right tools for t-cell repertoire analysis and then write a user interface to make the tools accessible to bench scientists. MiXCR stood out as the right analysis tool, so he reached out to the company. They were happy to give him a tour of MiXCR’s impressive immunology analysis suite and then introduced their newest offering: Platforma.  

“It was exactly what the customer wanted. Not only did they have the complete set of bioinformatics tools at the Unix command line, but they also had a user interface,” Van Etten told Bio-IT World.  

While MiXCR serves bioinformaticians who work with command lines and HPC clusters, Platforma represents the company's effort to put powerful analytical tools directly into biologists' hands. The project, which took nearly seven years to develop, consists of "millions of lines of code," according to Poslavsky. 

“The main goal of Platforma is to provide all of the computational tools, all of the analysis tools and everything directly into the hands of... the people who generate the data, the people who do the R&D,” he said. Biologists should be able to get answers from the data themselves, freeing up bioinformaticians to focus on developing new tools and algorithms, he believes.  

Platforma offers a powerful, interactive graphical user interface (GUI) for biologists that "speaks biological language," Poslavsky said. Behind the GUI is a back end designed to process large datasets and integrate data. For bioinformaticians, Platforma offers an API/SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows them to build applications designed for specific biological needs. The software can be installed on-premises, with the GUI running on end users' laptops and the backend operating either on a laptop, the customer's HPC environment, or on the cloud.   

This feature was particularly attractive for Van Etten. “Our customer wanted to be able to do it on her laptop, but she also wanted to be able to do it on the cloud at scale with many people like her accessing it.” 

Early adopters like GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca have enjoyed significant efficiency gains, Poslavsky said, reporting that GSK switched to Platform for analyzing three types of immune data. Tasks that previously took a month are now completed in just two days.  

Marketplace 

Like MiXCR, Platforma is open source for academic and non-commercial users. For start-ups, MiLabs offers an unlimited $5,000/year license with customer support, a structure that impressed Van Etten as, “extremely generous.” For large commercial entities, the tool is priced by usage but can vary based on needed integrations and infrastructure support.  

MiLabs has also built a marketplace where developers can share or sell applications. Most apps are open source, but monetization options exist for commercial developers. One example is ImmuneWatch, a company in the vaccine development space that has made its DETECT tool available on Platforma.  

“By bringing their tool to Platforma, they are making the user base like 100x larger than they have right now,” Poslavsky said. “Right now, their user base is just bioinformaticians who can run this complicated Docker stuff on the cloud. With Platforma, the user base for ImmuneWatch DETECT is the whole biology world.”  

Currently focused on sequencing data formats like FASTQ and FASTA files, MiLabs plans to expand into imaging data next, addressing the needs of biologists working with terabytes or even petabytes of information.  

Van Etten was blown away with the level of detail Platforma can provide now: kit-specific analysis, FASTQ analysis, quality scores of the sequences that came in, translation of DNA sequences to protein sequences, determining precise sequence length, and much more. 

When asked about tool options for other industries with very large data, Poslavsky laughs. “Well, you know, our CTO sometimes dreams.”  

Competitive Angle 

I asked Poslavsky where Platforma stands out among a field of GUIs for biologists. While other companies have focused on automation and workflows and creating an interface to run pipelines with a few clicks, they do not give answers to biologists’ questions, he said. “That's a different value proposition of the software for the end users. The biologists, they want to get answers. They don't care about the pipelines, workloads, and all the things.”  

He also highlighted the robustness of the technology. “The extremely powerful data layer with AI features allowing us to integrate all sorts of data, all ‘omics data, automatically, very efficiently. In this graphical user interface, I have a project with millions of cells… where the calculations are happening on the backend and the 3D visualizations happening here within microseconds. This is all because of the efficiency.”  

The integration capabilities, Poslavsky said, stand out as well. “If I add an application for single cell gene expression, and then I add application for immune sequencing of the same samples, if I run them, then on any visualization down the road… biologists can integrate the result from all these apps, automatically.” 

According to Poslavsky, user adoption has been strong even without marketing efforts, with a "10X conversion" rate from MiXCR users to Platforma. As the company continues to grow, it aims to further bridge the gap between biology and bioinformatics, empowering researchers to get more insights from their data independently. 

Van Etten was happy to have found a great solution for his client and is eager to spread the word. “I think it’s a really cool company. I like the people and I like the two products,” he said.