An immunologist's own flow cytometry app replaced paid lab software

Derya Unutmaz, MD@DeryaTR_

I am building an extremely sophisticated biomedical science application with GPT-6 Astra for analyzing flow cytometry data.

Flow cytometry is one of the most essential technologies in immunology. It allows us to analyze tens of thousands, or even millions, of individual cells from blood, tissues, or other samples, using fluorescently tagged antibodies that identify specific cell types and measure the proteins they express. It's like our window into the world of the cells.

For decades, labs like mine have paid thousands of dollars every year in subscription and licensing fees for commercial software to analyze these datasets. I have canceled all my subscriptions 😊

I have now almost built a fully functional, research-grade version of such an application with Astra! It already has a better UI/UX than many of the tools I have used, and my goal now is to make it even better than the leading commercial applications in this field!

I had in fact built earlier basic versions using previous Codex models, but this is the first time I have reached a version that works exactly the way I want it to, with the interface, analysis workflow, and features behaving almost perfectly. Previous versions took a lot of efforts with many bugs to deal with, with Astra you get what you ask for almost the first shot! It's just unbelievable!

And this is only one project. I have several other highly complex biological and biomedical software applications in my Astra pipeline. At this point, my main bottlenecks are basically token limits and the number of hours I can stay awake and massive coffee stocks! 😂

It is just incredible to think that scientific software that once required specialized development teams, years of engineering, and sometimes million dollar budgets can now be built by someone like me who has no software engineering experience!

With Astra you can just do things! ✨