Empowering scientists to deliver faster personalized cancer care
0 to 1 Product Design
Design Systems
13 months
Shipped
Explora The Product
A specialized biotech tool designed to accelerate cancer research. By unifying complex drug simulations and AI-driven cell modeling, Explora helps scientists identify personalized therapies for patients in record time.
Details
Web-based tool , IDE
surface
Founding Product Designer
role - solo individual contributor
CEO∙1 Product Manager∙1 Front-end Dev
team members
0 to 1 Product Strategy ∙ UX/UI ∙ Design System
scope
Problem Digital Chaos
Before Explora (the product), scientists juggled 9+ legacy tools and spreadsheets, causing high cognitive load and long manual tasks that created a productivity lag in cancer research.
Solution A Centralized IDE
I led the 0 to 1 design to unify fractured systems into a singular IDE, enabling scientists to conduct research within one platform.
Result Productivity Gains
I established the company’s first design system of ~80+ components. Product's first launch ensured 100% organization-wide adoption, reducing task time by 12.5% and saving nearly~$1.2M in annual productivity costs.
Impact
~$
1.2M
Recovered in
Productivity
Based on ~1 hr/day saved per user
100%
Organization
Wide Adoption
From C-Suite to Research Scientists
9
1
Systems
Consolidated
Unified legacy chaos into a single IDE
CONTEXT
Cellworks is a biotech company focused on curing cancer.
and how do they do that? They built a machine learning model that simulates human cell behavior. By running FDA-approved drug simulations on it, they identify the most effective and personalised therapies for cancer patients' unique DNA.
Scientists worked on the bio-model to update it as per new research findings and engineers worked on refining the model to produce more accurate results.
PROBLEM
Scientists' & engineers' productivity was at an all-time low. Their tools & systems were slowing them down, delaying research.
Scientists & engineers were stuck juggling too many tools, delaying cancer patient care. This is what they were dealing with,
Waiting a long time for systems to process
Dealing with the cognitive strain due to tool-hopping
GOALS + NORTH STAR
To design a unified R&D platform, from the ground up to accelerate the delivery of personalized cancer care.
Unify Systems: Consolidate 12+ legacy tools into one cohesive R&D platform to simplify complex workflows.
Accelerate Research: Speed up cancer research by eliminating "tool-hopping" and reducing cognitive strain for scientists.
Increase Throughput: Enable parallel experiments to fully leverage the platform's new asynchronous processing capabilities.
Scale Growth: Establish a foundational design system to efficiently support future biotech applications and features.
PROCESS + KEY INSIGHTS
I conducted contextual inquiries and interviews with computational biologists, machine learning engineers, and leadership to map disjointed R&D workflows and visualize a unified research ecosystem.
Key Insight 1: Fragmented Ecosystem navigating a scattered ecosystem of 12+ legacy tools forced constant app-switching, which disrupted scientific focus and slowed research progress.
Key Insight 2: Processing Bottleneck the legacy "one-task-at-a-time" system created a gap where expert staff had to sit idle while waiting for experiments to process, losing valuable research time.
Key Insight 3: Manual Insight Cycle relying on Excel exports and external tools to render data created a heavy lag between running an experiment and actually understanding the results.
SOLUTION
Explora, a scalable, systems-driven MVP consolidating legacy tools into a high-performance workspace that empowers scientists & engineers to conduct cancer research faster.
BRANDING
Logo inspired by the intertwining of the DNA strands, the unique makeup of a human. The 'X' in 'Explora' replaces the letter.
DESIGN
The Split-Workspace Grid
enabling parallel reasoning
This feature allows scientists to position the model viewer and code editor side-by-side, enabling them to examine complex protein properties while simultaneously writing modeling code. By unifying these previously separate applications into a single interface, it directly supports the insight that researchers reason in parallel and require high-density workspaces to maintain their scientific flow.
DESIGN
The Plotter
accelerating insights by visual synthesis
The Plotter allows researchers to load multiple simulation models and visually overlay results in a single, integrated environment. By replacing cognitively heavy Excel exports with at-a-glance comparisons, it solves the "Manual Data Fatigue" insight and empowers scientists to iterate on drug developments faster.
DESIGN
The Progress Bar & View Selector
eliminating research downtime
I designed a system to handle the transition from a synchronous to an asynchronous back-end. While the View Selector allows scientists to switch fluidly between active applications during a simulation, the Ongoing Tasks panel provides a global, bird's-eye view of experiment progress. Together, these features transformed a legacy 'one-task-at-a-time' bottleneck into a high-throughput environment where scientists can simulate and monitor multiple experiments in parallel.
A scientist always has a bird's view of the progress of his experiment simulations.
A scientist can write a drug experiment code while looking at the model to run it on.
REFLECTIONS
Need for a Deep Domain Understanding: To design for experts, you have to understand their world. By diving into bio-modeling science, I moved from just "translating requirements" to becoming a co-innovator who made complex data more actionable.
Learning the Art of Prioritization: Working as a solo designer taught me how to prioritize. I built a lean, 80-component foundation instead of a bloated system, allowing us to hit a tight launch deadline while keeping the platform scalable.
Designing to reduce Cognitive Load: Combining fragmented tools was about psychology, not just tech. By creating a "one-stop" workspace, I reduced the cognitive strain of tool-hopping, helping scientists stay focused on their research instead of their software.
WHAT I WOULD DO NEXT..
Introduce an AI-powered chat assistant
Biotech is one of the fastest growing areas where AI is being used extensively for research. Leveraging it, I'd focus on introducing an AI-powered chat assistant primarily focused on automating many of the daily tasks.
Explora's smart scientists and engineers lived happily every after
fin.