NewYorkBIO Launches a 1,200+ Resource Life Science Hub in Five Months, on a Fixed Deadline
A multi-agency resource hub, built and launched against a non-negotiable public date.
NewYorkBIO is the leading advocate and authority for the life science community in New York State, connecting hundreds of bioscience companies, universities, and research institutions. For years, the organization had envisioned a digital resource hub that could bring funding, facilities, and services together in one searchable place — but launching it meant hitting a fixed, non-negotiable date: the NewYorkBIO Innovation Summit on September 30, 2025.
NewYorkBIO didn’t have the internal technical capacity to build something at this scale itself. And the scope wasn’t fully defined going in — particularly how information for the hub would actually be sourced, and what could be automated versus what needed manual entry.
NewYorkBIO needed a technical partner who could resolve that ambiguity quickly, build against a hard deadline, and coordinate cleanly across multiple organizations with a stake in getting it right.
The Aboard Solution
We joined NewYorkBIO’s team to provide the technical execution the project needed, working alongside design partner Boldworld (who led research, content strategy, and website design) and coordinating closely with NewYorkBIO’s public-sector partners, NYCEDC and Empire State Development.
What We Delivered
New York Bio Connect: a searchable, filterable resource hub spanning three categories: funding opportunities, facilities, and services & programs. These were integrated with third-party data sources including Google Places, built on WordPress with TypeScript and SCSS.
Key Technical Achievements
- Directory architecture across three distinct resource types, each with its own categorization (facilities alone span nine types, from academic medical centers to makerspaces)
- Third-party data integration (Google Places and others) for dynamic, accurate content rather than static listings
- A dedicated Discovery phase that resolved sourcing and automation questions before development began, rather than discovering them mid-build
Where AI Did the Work
AI played a limited, targeted role here rather than driving the build. Claude and Copilot were used for isolated pieces of functionality and to help generate sample data based on the platform’s data model. The project as a whole was not built through an AI-first workflow, it was built the traditional way.
Where Humans Did the Work
Every design was checked by hand against Figma and implemented manually. All code was peer-reviewed. One team member wrote it, another reviewed it, and testing was done manually throughout the build, including the third-party integrations.
How We Verified It Was Correct and Safe to Ship
The team tested manually throughout the build and ran a full round of user acceptance testing before launch. UAT came back clean: no functional bugs found, only minor adjustments once the team saw the product working against real data.
The Technical Challenge
With a very clear deadline, the ambiguity here was about what to build and how. The team had to determine how information for the hub would actually be sourced, whether scraped or entered manually, and what could reasonably be automated. A dedicated discovery phase resolved this before development began: the team evaluated the available options, brought findings and recommendations back to NewYorkBIO, and refined the scope around what was genuinely feasible. That groundwork is also why the team delivered the full agreed MVP scope without cutting core functionality to hit the deadline.
Results & Impacts
A Resource Hub, Fully Populated
1,002 funding opportunities, 97 facilities, and 132 services and programs (and growing) are now searchable and filterable in one place. It’s a resource that didn’t exist in this form before.
Delivered Against a Fixed Deadline
The full agreed MVP scope shipped on time for the NewYorkBIO Innovation Summit, with UAT turning up no functional bugs before launch.
A Partnership That’s Continued
Aboard has remained engaged with NewYorkBIO on an ongoing technical support retainer since launch.
Want to see how Aboard could work for a project like this? Get in touch.