Opentrons goals to democratize lab entry with its Flex robotic

Two phrases jumped out at me whereas talking with Opentrons CEO Jon Brennan-Badal and investor Vinod Khosla: reproducibility and repeatability. These are, in fact, necessary ideas on the planet of analysis. They’re keys to profitable experimentation, however quite a lot of completely different variables can stand between them and researchers.

It’s one of many foundational guarantees of Opentrons’ new Flex system. What if analysis parameters might be programmed right into a machine, making it simpler to breed circumstances?

“An excellent instance could be if Nature needed to publish an article,” Khosla tells Information World. “We see a lot about irreproducible information or fudged information and all that. They may actually run the identical experiments and say to the writer, ‘submit the software program script to run that experiment.”

The machine, which superficially resembles a desktop printer, measures two ft by two ft by two ft. Opentrons is making the system’s API accessible to researchers, permitting for the creation of workflows. That might imply finishing up experiments or performing exams. The corporate, which was based in 2014, has a great deal of expertise with the latter. The corporate subleased lab area in 2020 as a pandemic response.

“Opentrons has examined the vast majority of COVID samples run within the New York metro space,” says Brennan-Badal. “We examined over 15 million folks. We arrange our lab. All of these samples had been run with below $250,000 value of apparatus.”

Flex is the successor to the OT-2, the machine that carried out these exams, which discovered shoppers within the Mayo Clinic, Harvard and MIT. The opposite massive promise right here is democratization. Very similar to the world of surgical robotics, Flex is an try and democratize entry, together with a decrease barrier of entry for value. The system shall be accessible for an upfront price (versus a RaaS mannequin), which the corporate guarantees is 1/tenth that of established industrial programs. It can begin delivery in August.

Opentrons will even proceed to supply its personal labs so amenities that don’t have the sources can outsource testing — akin to what it did with COVID. “We’re fixing the issue for a lab of: you wish to get lab work completed. Some stuff you wish to do on [premises]. Some stuff you need to have the ability to do within the cloud. Typically occasions folks wish to determine what the fitting course of is on [premises], they usually need to have the ability to scale that course of. That’s the place it’s useful to have the ability to outsource it to us.”