In a position Labs (official site) is a South Korean startup that desires to drastically enhance the effectivity of sure sorts of laboratory (labs) organic workflow, particularly for medium and small labs.
In accordance with ABLE Labs, 46% of lab professionals spend greater than 9 hours per week on primary pipetting duties. This may not be essentially the most wonderful work within the lab, however it nonetheless must be executed fastidiously and exactly. In the event you’re curious, you possibly can have a look at this “guide to proper pipetting” to know the steps concerned.
Worse, this will likely contribute to a piece “burnout” that 85.3% of such employees expertise on this trade, regardless that it’s very arduous to rent in that area. Maybe essentially the most dramatic statistic is that 70% of researchers can’t reproduce another person’s experiment, maybe as a result of issue of completely reproducing the circumstances of the preliminary experiment. In the end, pipetting duties are seen as a main friction generator in analysis.
In fact, some automation exists, however each the value and complexity of immediately’s options (~200k to ~300k in line with ABLE Labs) make it unaffordable for a lot of labs, like in Academia, and really advanced to study due to a scarcity of excellent UX design.
ABLE Labs’ answer comes as two “liquid handler” merchandise: NOTABLE and SUITABLE. The corporate designed them for various throughput necessities and worth factors. NOTABLE is a really compact system we’ve seen in motion in Korea. It looks as if it may be arrange in a short time in anywhere. Designed easy workflows, the maker factors out that it could actually assist “11 ANSI/SLAS microplate slots, which will also be outfitted with magnetic shaker, temperature shaker and ULPA fan filter for max flexibility”
The SUITABLE mannequin is designed for extra advanced and better throughput workflows. It might probably adapt to various kinds of plates, tubes, and reservoirs discovered out there, and its multi-channel pipette ensures it could actually work very quick. Its Vacutainer rack has a capability of 194 to 384 tubes, and its gripper can drastically scale back guide intervention, in line with ABLE Labs.
The corporate makes use of a cloud-based SaaS with a seemingly higher UX than your typical legacy management system to regulate these gadgets. I haven’t used it in manufacturing and am basing this opinion after trying on the common UI. One of many fundamental added values right here is that the UX is straightforward sufficient that no specialised technicians are required to design and function the experiments.
ABLE Labs has partnered with Samsung Biologics for a proof of idea (PoC) utilizing NOTABLE to show the worth of its merchandise. Throughout testing, automation prices had been reduce by 90%; experiments had been 95% reproducible, and human intervention was decreased by 17%.
From a enterprise standpoint, ABLE Labs needs to create an ecosystem round its machines and software program the place {hardware} gross sales, upkeep, and consumables could be a core proposition. On the identical time, the corporate also can present or combine 3rd get together ODM/OEM merchandise for its clients as a further means to earn revenues.
With all the right South Korean certifications and benchmarks in hand, the core enterprise will begin there. In parallel, the corporate reveals a gross sales pipeline with large names just like the (south Korean) Nationwide Science Museum, Korea Superior Institute of Science and Expertise (KAIST, or Korea’s MIT), and extra.
You possibly can see these two products at CES if you wish to get a really feel for what the UX appears to be like like. We like the thought of getting extra reasonably priced and optimized medical analysis instruments as a result of that may actually do some good on a worldwide scale.
Filed in . Learn extra about CES, CES 2024, Korea and Startups.
Trending Merchandise
