Key Takeaways
- Foray Bioscience has launched Pando, a platform that consolidates in vitro plant culture knowledge, research protocols, and laboratory operations into a single workspace.
- More than 70% of in vitro plant production projects currently fail due to protocol complexity, with a single production workflow dependent on over 34 individual variables.
- Of more than 350,000 land plant species, only around 2% have been meaningfully studied in vitro, leaving most plant culture projects without usable prior knowledge to draw on.
- Pando is available via self-serve signup in three tiers ranging from a free Core plan to a $249/month Pro plan, and is already in use across academic and commercial environments.
- Foray Bioscience uses Pando internally to develop fabricated seeds, with active commercial partnerships with Z's Nutty Ridge and West Coast Chestnut.
Foray Bioscience Launches Pando to Address Fragmented In Vitro Plant Knowledge Infrastructure
Foray Bioscience has announced the launch of Pando, a platform designed to consolidate in vitro plant culture knowledge, research protocols, and laboratory operations. The company describes it as the world's largest structured in vitro plant knowledge base combined with AI-assisted research tools — built in response to what Foray characterizes as a persistent infrastructure gap in plant science.
The platform is already in use across academic and commercial settings. Foray reports that users have reached successful in vitro plant protocols more than three times faster than through conventional approaches, though the company did not provide details on how that figure was measured.
The Structural Problem in Plant Culture Research
Plant science sits at an unusual intersection of scale and neglect. Plants underpin an estimated half of global GDP, yet research infrastructure in the sector remains highly fragmented. Relevant knowledge is distributed across academic papers, spreadsheets, lab notebooks, and institutional memory with limited interoperability. Of more than 350,000 known land plant species, only around 2% have been meaningfully studied in vitro.
That knowledge deficit has practical consequences. Growing a plant from the cell up can involve more than 40 interacting variables in a single culture workflow. Without shared, structured prior knowledge, most projects start from scratch — increasing development timelines, costs, and failure rates. Foray puts the current in vitro project failure rate at above 70%.
“Translation of new plant products and crop varieties, from lab to market, hinges on successful in vitro workflows. Today, more than 70% of these projects fail due to the extreme complexity of protocol design: A single production process depends on more than 34 individual variables, which would require a boggling 17 billion experiments and more than 2 billion years to fully explore. The future of plant production requires turning plant knowledge into predictive models that improve the odds of success, learning and improving over time,” said Ashley Beckwith, founder and CEO of Foray Bioscience.
What Foray Bioscience's Pando Does and Who Uses It
Pando is designed for organizations working across plant propagation, bioengineering, biomanufacturing, research, and conservation. The platform allows users to search and compare media formulations across sources, build and share protocols with embedded data standards, manage biological collections and team tasks, and design statistically structured experiments. An AI assistant provides project-specific guidance. A forthcoming module will allow users to score and predict protocol performance computationally before beginning lab work.
Foray uses Pando internally to support its fabricated seed development programs. The company has entered commercial fabricated seed partnerships with Z's Nutty Ridge and West Coast Chestnut to accelerate the production and distribution of domestically-adapted nut tree varieties.
Pando is available via self-serve signup on their website.
