Able Labs (official web site) is a South Korean startup that wishes to drastically enhance the effectivity of sure varieties of laboratory (labs) organic workflow, particularly for medium and small labs.
According to ABLE Labs, 46% of lab professionals spend greater than 9 hours per week on primary pipetting duties. This may not be essentially the most superb work within the lab, but it surely nonetheless has to be completed rigorously and exactly. If you’re curious, you may have a look at this “guide to proper pipetting” to perceive the steps concerned.
Worse, this will likely contribute to a piece “burnout” that 85.3% of such staff expertise on this business, despite the fact that it’s very exhausting to rent in that house. Perhaps essentially the most dramatic statistic is that 70% of researchers can’t reproduce another person’s experiment, maybe due to the problem of completely reproducing the circumstances of the preliminary experiment. Ultimately, pipetting duties are seen as a main friction generator in analysis.
Of course, some automation exists, however each the value and complexity of at this time’s options (~200k to ~300k in accordance to ABLE Labs) make it unaffordable for a lot of labs, like in Academia, and very complicated to study due to a scarcity of excellent UX design.
ABLE Labs’ resolution comes as two “liquid handler” merchandise: NOTABLE and SUITABLE. The firm designed them for various throughput necessities and value factors. NOTABLE is a really compact system we’ve seen in motion in Korea. It looks like it may be arrange in a short time in anyplace. Designed easy workflows, the maker factors out that it may well assist “11 ANSI/SLAS microplate slots, which can also be equipped with magnetic shaker, temperature shaker and ULPA fan filter for maximum flexibility”
The SUITABLE mannequin is designed for extra complicated and increased throughput workflows. It can adapt to various kinds of plates, tubes, and reservoirs discovered out there, and its multi-channel pipette ensures it may well work very quick. Its Vacutainer rack has a capability of 194 to 384 tubes, and its gripper can enormously cut back handbook intervention, in accordance to ABLE Labs.
The firm makes use of a cloud-based SaaS with a seemingly higher UX than your typical legacy management system to management these units. I haven’t used it in manufacturing and am basing this opinion after wanting on the basic UI. One of the principle added values right here is that the UX is easy 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. During testing, automation prices had been reduce by 90%; experiments had been 95% reproducible, and human intervention was diminished by 17%.
From a enterprise standpoint, ABLE Labs desires to create an ecosystem round its machines and software program the place {hardware} gross sales, upkeep, and consumables could be a core proposition. At the identical time, the corporate may also present or combine 3rd get together ODM/OEM merchandise for its prospects as an extra 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 exhibits a gross sales pipeline with huge names just like the (south Korean) National Science Museum, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST, or Korea’s MIT), and extra.
You can see these two merchandise at CES if you’d like to get a really feel for what the UX seems to be like. We like the thought of getting extra inexpensive and optimized medical analysis instruments as a result of that can definitely do some good on a world scale.
Filed in . Read extra about CES, CES 2024, Korea and Startups.