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Jacob Lee and Jin Cho: Rebuilding the Software Layer Under Modern Research

Most scientific research still runs on infrastructure built for a different century. Spreadsheets lock when two people open them. Freezer inventories live in a senior postdoc's head. An estimated ten billion dollars is spent every year in the United States rebuying reagents already sitting on a shelf nobody could find.

In this conversation, Jacob Lee and Jin Cho — co-founders of GeneMode — describe what they saw when they looked at that infrastructure as outsiders and as scientists at once. Lee is a bioengineer whose first year of graduate school was defined by scheduling thirty-minute appointments on a senior postdoc's calendar just to access the lab's inventory software, and that experience is what turned frustration into a company. Cho came from engineering software for military drones at General Atomics, and was stunned when he saw what his friend's lab was paying for a tool that looked straight out of Windows XP.

They talk about the slow architecture of drug discovery, the compounding cost of irreproducibility, and why rebuilding the tools scientists use every day is, for them, the most direct path to getting cures to patients faster.

About the Guests

Jacob Lee is the CEO and co-founder of GeneMode. He trained as a bioengineer and worked as a research scientist in stem cell and cancer labs before founding the company. His frustrations as a first-year graduate student navigating inaccessible lab software became the seed for GeneMode. He leads the company's product vision, focused on inventory, experiment management, and research reproducibility.

Jin Cho is the CTO and co-founder of GeneMode. Trained in electrical and computer engineering, he began his career at General Atomics building software for military drones before reuniting with his high-school friend Lee to rebuild research tools from the ground up. At GeneMode he leads the engineering team and the platform's weekly release cycle.

Scientific Themes of the Conversation

The cost of irreproducibility — waste, delay, and the compounding friction of bad tools
Access asymmetry in research — who gets to use the lab's software, and who waits
Research software as infrastructure — why tools built for scientists behave differently than tools adapted to them
The drug discovery timeline — preclinical, clinical, and regulatory phases, and where software actually matters
Collaboration in shared labs — real-time editing, shared freezers, and the Excel-lock problem
Lab automation and the hidden operating cost of being a scientist

Key Insights from the Conversation

Ten billion dollars vanishes every year into duplicate reagent orders. Lee describes an estimate that American labs spend roughly ten billion dollars annually on reagents they already own but can't locate. The cost isn't just money — it's the erosion of reproducibility that follows from not knowing what's in the freezer.

Access to the lab's tools is often rationed by seniority. In Lee's first graduate lab, only the principal investigator and a senior postdoc had logins for the expensive inventory software. As a student, he scheduled thirty-minute appointments on a postdoc's calendar to learn how to use a tool the lab had already paid thousands of dollars for.

Excel is the default research tool because no one built a better one for scientists. The co-founders argue that most lab software wasn't built for scientists — it was built for general business use and retrofitted. That explains the locked files, the manual re-entry, the outdated look, and the poor fit with how research actually moves.

Lab infrastructure is the hidden variable in drug discovery timelines. COVID-era conversations about why vaccines take eighteen months tend to focus on the clinical and regulatory phases. Lee reframes the question toward the preclinical phase, where data management and reproducibility quietly compound every delay downstream.

Private and shared workspaces both matter, even in collaborative labs. Cho and Lee describe designing for the reality of shared benchwork: most labs want everything visible to everyone, but individual scientists still need space for protocols-in-progress or personal collections they're not ready to publish internally.

Fast release cycles are a signal of infrastructure maturity. Cho describes shipping updates weekly, prioritizing customer-reported bugs and feature requests with a design-to-test-to-ship loop that most scientific software vendors don't attempt. That cadence is itself a philosophical statement about who the tool serves.

A ninth-grade English class is an unlikely origin for scientific infrastructure. The GeneMode story starts with two teenagers in the same high-school classroom, different majors, different career paths, and a late-night message asking whether lab software could be hacked together in a weekend. The answer turned out to be no — but the question turned into a company.

Episode Timeline

Timestamps were generated using AI for readability.

00:00 Summit week welcome and episode introduction
01:34 Meeting the co-founders — CEO Lee and CTO Cho
03:11 From stem cell research to bioengineering frustration
04:03 The ninth-grade English class where the story starts
04:59 Seeing Windows XP-era software inside a modern lab
07:01 What GeneMode actually does that Excel can't
10:15 Onboarding a ten-person lab onto one shared platform
12:18 Ten billion dollars in wasted reagents
16:13 What's coming next — tools across the experimental lifecycle
18:32 Algorithms that predict when reagents will run out
22:43 A weekly release cycle built around user feedback
24:13 Why vaccines still take eighteen months

Selected Quotes

"A lot of the problems that we're solving is around data sharing for scientists — by having inventory, experiment management, applications, and data all in one collaborative workspace." — Jacob Lee

"It looks like software that was built a couple of decades ago. And what surprised me even more was his lab was paying thousands of dollars for this legacy-looking software. I was mind-blown." — Jin Cho

"In a lab of ten people, only the principal investigator and a very senior postdoc had access to the software. And as a student, I had to actually schedule times on my postdoc's calendar in thirty-minute segments just to learn how to use that tool." — Jacob Lee

"The end goal is really much bigger than helping scientists manage their research projects or inventory. Our mission is to make that research repeatable and reproducible so that we can get those cures faster." — Jacob Lee

About this episode

In this special episode of the Dr.GPCR podcast, I sat down with the co-founders of Genemod. Jacob Lee and Jin Choe met in ninth grade in English class and have been friends since. Although both went to the same college, Jacob and Jin choose different career paths. One day as they were catching up, Jacob shared his struggles of managing samples and an incredible amount of data and projects in the lab with Jin. Our of this need Genemod was born. Today, Genemod has built a freezer management tool and a project management tool where scientists can manage their reagents, samples, and projects on one intuitive platform. The team is planning on building even more tools that will make Genemod the go-to platform for all research scientists to make research more efficient.

Genemode on the web