Opentrons aims to democratize lab access with Flex robots

While talking to Opentrons CEO Jon Brennan-Badal and investor Vinod Khosla, two words jumped out at me: repeatability and reproducibility. Of course, these are important concepts in the field of study. They are key to the success of an experiment, but there can be many different variables between them and the researcher.

This is one of the fundamental promises of Opentrons' new Flex system. What if study parameters could be programmed into the machine, making it easier to reproduce conditions?

“A good example of this is when Nature had to publish an article,” Khosla told TechCrunch. "We see so much non-reproducible data or fabricated data and so on. They could actually run the same experiment and say to the authors, 'Submit a software script to run that experiment.' "

The machine superficially resembles a desktop printer, measuring two feet by two feet by two feet. Opentrons is making the system's API available to researchers to create workflows. This may mean conducting experiments or conducting tests. The company, founded in 2014, has extensive experience in the latter. The company subleased lab space in 2020 as a response to the pandemic.

“Opentrons has tested the majority of COVID-19 samples run in the New York metropolitan area,” Brennan-Badahl said. "We tested over 15 million people. We set up labs. All of these samples were run using equipment that cost less than $250,000."

The Flex is the successor to the OT-2, the machine that performs these tests and which has customers at the Mayo Clinic, Harvard University, and MIT. The other big promise here is democratization. Like the field of surgical robotics, Flex is an attempt at democratization, including lowering price barriers to entry. The system will have an upfront cost (versus a RaaS model), which the company promises is 1/10th of existing industrial systems. Shipping will begin in August.

Opentrons will also continue to provide its own labs so that institutions without the resources can outsource testing — similar to what it did with the coronavirus. “We’re solving a problem in the lab: You want to get lab work done. You want to do something on [the premises]. You want to be able to do something in the cloud. People often want to figure out what’s right on [the premises] process, and they want to be able to scale that process — that’s where outsourcing it to us helps.”