Pharyx is developing systems to automate the study of microorganisms for basic research and bioprocess characterization and optimization. The microbioreactor technology that underpins the firm's work was initially developed in Professor Rajeev Ram's laboratory at MIT. The firm is also developing systems to miniaturize and automate cell culture processes in an effort to standardize and simplify cell culture, eliminating variability between experiments and across scales. Through microfluidics and integration, large scale bioreactors can be miniaturized to the milliliter scale, enabling parallelization in addition to automated control.