SLAS: automation start ups set to enable P4 medicine
On the second day of SLAS 2025, the world's largest laboratory automation conference in San Diego, the last two finalists of the Ignite Award pitched their business models. Meanwhile, the 10 finalists of the SLAS New Product Award showcased their systems in the Innovation AveNEW area of the exhibition.
Leroy Hood’s vision of P4 or ‘systemic’ medicine (preventive, predictive, personalised, participatory) is becoming a reality. By using omics data and medical records to create AI-powered individual health profiles, new automated product innovations aim to target diseases before symptoms even appear, reducing healthcare costs.
On the second day of the SLAS 2025 conference, SLAS Ignite Award nominee Axor Biotech Inc and Swiss company Visienco AG, founded just a week before, will present novel automation platforms for chip electrophoresis and shear-free sorting of organoids. At the exhibition and its start-up area Innovation AveNEW, the ten finalists of the SLAS New Product Award presented their ground-breaking product innovations.
Seattle-based Axor Biosystems’ founders Abizar Lakdawalla (CEO) and Brett Anderson (CTO) have developed a cost-effective, high-throughput approach that automates and miniaturises microfludic electrophoresis. Their One-Box platform carries out purification, analysis and dectection in 96 well microplate format leading to 10-fold higher throughput and reduction of process costs by factor 10. The company targets the US$5.6bn market for analytical electrophoresis, the US$4.1bn market for biomolecule purification as well as the US$23bn market for biomolecule affinity assays at the same time. Axor’s technology provides autonomous electrophoresis cells arrayed in microplate strips that offer interoperability for a broad range of electrophoresis applications. Specifically, the electrophoresis consumables are available as 2, 4, 8 well/cell microplate strips. The strips are self-contained and only require the addition of a sample (DNA, RNA, protein and cell or cell lysates suspended in a labelling mix) depending on the specific application. These strips are held in a microplate holder and are processed in an instrument that controls the electrophoresis within each cell independently of the other cells under real-time imaging control.
CSEM SA spin-out
Swiss Visienco, focussing on automated life sciences technology, was just founded a week before SLAS 2025 kicked off. The CSEM SA spin out company’s ORGADROID platform for sorting organoids using bright-field imaging and deep learning classifies and transfers organoids to target labware. It was presented for the first time last December and is set to be available by mid-2025, according to co-founders Lucie Jandet (COO), Jonas Goldowsky (CTO) and Edwige Guinet (CEO). ORGADROID comprises an automated instrument that allows the sorting and monitoring of highly different fragile large organoids (up to 5mm in diameter) for drug development. The company’s autoclave-compatible device comes with a novel pipetting tip design preventing the shear forces occurring in classical flow-through and pick & place systems. It has an integrated microscope and deep learning image analysis algorithm to select and classify certain cell types by organoid size, circularity, (retinal) outer receptors. According to COO Lucie Jandet, several partners from the Basel Area have already adopted the system into workflows. Jandet added that Visienco’s plans was to expand the company to a staff of ten by 2027.
New Product Award finalists
Ten product developments presented in the Innovation AveNew exhibition area are in the final round for the SLAS New Product Award: Microlab PuriFY (Hamilton Bonaduz AG), the update to the LINQ platform (Automata Technologies Ltd) presented a few days before SLAS 2025, Dianthus uHTS (NanoTemper Technologies GmbH), Vireo™ (Ramona Optics, Inc), VisionCyte (ThinkCyte Inc), iconPCR (n6 Tec Inc), Pixel Octo (CytoTronics Inc), SemaCyte® Microcarrier (SLAS Europe Ignite Award winner Semarion Ltd), Nanovial Multicell Assay Kits (Partillion Bioscience Corp), Galaxy mechanoporation platform (Portal Biotechnologies Inc).
London-headquartered Automata Ltd launched the first generation of its vertically integrated automation platform, LINQ, two years ago at SLAS 2023 in San Diego, following a US$40m financing round and achieving an annual growth rate of 125%. The open platform, which has seen significant adoption across science labs, hospital groups, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and CROs, was updated just four days before SLAS 2025 commenced. LINQ connects existing hardware, such as liquid handlers and plate readers, within a laboratory using a robotic arm and a transport layer, both of which handle labware and consumables throughout the workflow. This integration automates processes without compromising instrument accessibility or lab space. Additionally, instruments and data are digitally linked via a Python-based software, empowering scientists to design, schedule, and execute workflows seamlessly. LINQ enables laboratories to integrate and automate any number of common benchtop instruments, including liquid handlers and plate readers, while accommodating customers’ existing equipment or preferred instruments. The LINQ Bench supports open integration, allowing lab technicians to stay hands-on with familiar workflows, maintain direct access to equipment, and manually interact with labware when necessary. The second generation of LINQ, launched on 23 January, introduces enhanced comfort and scalability. It enables laboratories to double or even triple their instrument capacity within the same footprint, supported by a cloud-native architecture for centralised collaboration and management from anywhere, anytime. This version also integrates AI models and data while offering intuitive tools such as a drag-and-drop interface. For developers, it includes a Python software developer kit (SDK), providing unmatched customisation and control over workcells.
Hamilton Company is excited to unveil its latest innovation in magnetic bead-based nucleic acid purification for NGS and PCR applications. At SLAS 2025, the company introduced the Microlab PuriFY, a cutting-edge system featuring patented magnetic purification technology powered by easy-to-use software, simplifying a tedious, error-prone workflow for bench scientists around the globe. The Microlab PuriFY integrates a positive pressure and micro-dispensing head with patented 8-well strip consumables and dual magnetic arms to precisely automate nucleic acid purification from 1 to 96-samples. This solution enhances reproducibility, sustainability, and efficiency all in a compact, benchtop design, giving scientists time back in their day to focus on their critical research.
After CytoTronics Inc won last year’s SLAS New Product Award with its electric field impedance-based semiconductor plate reader Pixel, this year, the SLAS selected the five-year-old Boston start-up’s latest development launched at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR 2024) in Hamburg. The Pixel™ Octo scales the throughput of the company’s Pixel Primo reader, which gained 20 contractors within its early adopter programme that started in February 2024, by factor 8. The Pixel Octo is a benchtop Pixel plate reader within an incubator that increases the scale at which researchers can functionally characterise live cells without any limitation of spatial resolution or throughput seen in common CMOS multielectrode arrays. Pixel plates also overcome a limitation of high-content imaging systems, which only allow endpoint images of fixed cells. Using 4,096 electrodes at 25 µm spatial resolution per well to measure 20 different morphological properties of cells including cell barrier, attachment, flatness, and motility every 15 min, Pixel Octo can acquire data from up to eight, 96 or 384 well Pixel microplates. Additionally, it can monitor electrophysiological signals from cardiomyocytes and neurons, and the oxidative state of cultures in a single assay and is set to yield more impressive results in compound screening that its smaller predecessor. The multi-plate acquisition and consolidation of several data types greatly increases throughput for functional cell assays, which typically require several disparate instrument platforms and are conducted in single 6-96 well plates.
Pleasanton-headquartered n6 Tec Inc will showcase its one-year-old iconPCR system at SLAS. Launched at AGBT 2024 in Orlando, it is the first thermocycler with 96 independently controlled and monitored wells, designed to address the growing bottleneck in automated sample preparation for downstream PCR and NGS applications, which have surged with single-cell and spatial genomics. Featuring 96 distinct thermocycling elements, iconPCR offers unparalleled sample preparation capabilities while maintaining the high-throughput format essential for academic labs and (pre)clinical R&D.
Munich-based NanoTemper Technologies GmbH presented its 10 month-old Dianthus uHTS system quantifying for molecular interactions in solution. The system, according to NanoTemper “the fastest biophysical binding affinity measurement instrument on the market, and the first that keeps up with the demands of high-throughput screening”, significantly speeds up drug screening, even of challenging modalities such as PROTACs, intrinsically disordered proteins and fragment libraries. Using spectral shift and temperature-related intensity change, Dianthus uHTS measures a 1536-well plate in less than eight minutes and can be fully automated via an open gRPC framework allowing to use the same method for primary screens and lead optimisation. This dramatically reduces assay development costs without needing prior knowledge of a drug target’s binding sites. The instrument delivers single-point screening data for hit-ID, dose response data for lead optimisation, and binding information for structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies.
Partillion Bioscience Corp was invited to present its Nanovial Multicell Assay Kits launched in an Early Access Programme last August. These assays enable the study of cell-to-cell interactions by co-localising multiple cell types within microscopic compartments. Designed for high-throughput screening, they allow researchers to analyse interactions like antibody-antigen binding, immune cell activation, and cell to cell signalling in their natural context. With easy integration into existing workflows and leveraging existing flow cytometry instrumentation, Nanovial Multicell Assays accelerate discoveries in immunology, oncology, and therapeutic development, offering exceptionally high resolution and live cell recovery. According to Joe de Rutte, co-founder and CEO of Partillion, “Nanovial Multicell Assays are a game-changer, opening up new possibilities in research areas where the precise co-localisation of cells is essential for studying complex cell-to-cell interactions or screening for therapeutic molecules released by one cell that act on another.”
Two-year-old Portal Biotechnologies Inc introduced its Galaxy platform for intracellular delivery of virtually any molecular cargo into any cell type. Their new product launch is building on early momentum from Portal’s existing beta program that has gained over 50 partners for research and clinical scale use – including a majority of the top 10 pharma. The new Galaxy platform was launched in collaboration with Eppendorf and can integrate with a variety of other liquid handlers to enable seemless high-throughput implementations. Portal is a member of the Bayer Co.Lab, a cell and gene therapy accelerator co-located with the Bayer Research and Innovation Center (BRIC) in Kendall Square. The process of mechanical delivery relies on transient perturbation of a cell’s membrane as it transits through microscopic holes in a thin, specially designed silicon surface. It has been shown to enable delivery of a variety of molecules into cells, including siRNA, mRNA, polypeptides and CRISPR RNP complexes, both individually and simultaneously, for multiplexed cell function modification. Galaxy has demonstrated significant potential to enable novel assays and cell engineering applications.
According to Ramona Optics Inc, its newly launched product Vireo™ is the world’s fastest live-cell imaging system, marrying live-cell imaging with high-throughput screening. Ramona’s proprietary imaging GPU packs an array of 24 microscopes into the footprint of a multi-well plate to capture cellular-scale detail and dynamics in real time. Unlike traditional single-lens systems, Ramona’s synchronised array delivers a significant speed advantage: it is twelve times faster than a leading high-content imager in a head-to-head comparison and images an entire 96 well plate in brightfield with 10 z-slices in a minute. An on-board computer running state-of-the-art vision transformers digitises the 24 data streams in real-time to provide users with synthesised quantitative metrics such as organoid size and cell count instantly for entire multi-well plates. The new product’s competitive edge lies in the seamless integration of advanced optics, machine learning-driven data pipelines, and proprietary GPU acceleration, empowering biologists and clinicians to be better informed by data increased by an order of magnitude without sacrificing time. Vireo integrates AI-driven analysis tools, including automated segmentation and viability assessments, streamlining workflows from imaging to actionable insights. Early case studies demonstrate its ability to distinguish between cytotoxic and cytostatic effects of chemotherapeutic compounds, analyse growth dynamics of 3D tumour organoids, and quantify morphological features across thousands of conditions.
SLAS Europe 2024 Ignite Award winner Semarion Ltd. presented its SemaCyte® Microcarriers, which, according to the Cambridge University spin-out company, “revolutionise how adherent cells are handled, assayed, and stored”. Semarion’s ultra-miniaturised, barcoded wells capture adherent cells and bring them into suspension, enabling the movement of fully adherent 2D cells with common liquid handling tools. Provided as immobilised arrays on standard Petri dishes for easy cell loading, SemaCytes are dispensed into microplates to enhance high-content imaging and high-throughput screening.
Pushed by a US$32m Series C financing, single-cell analysis and cell sorting specialist ThinkCyte Inc is set to expand the distribution of its label-free VisionCyte high-throughput, AI-driven morphometric drug screening platform, initially launched in 2023, globally. The system, which has already been adopted by major biopharmaceutical companies and academic institutions, is the first cell sorter to combine analytical features found in conventional fluorescence flow sorters with the ability to perform label-free cell sorting and unbiased morphological analysis of cell populations. The combined capabilities can enable researchers to not only view cells based on a combination of known markers and morphological phenotypes, but also sort out unique populations for downstream processing or molecular analysis.
Together with the Ignite Award, the New Product Award will be presented to up to three winning product entries at 5:30 p.m. PST in the Ignite Theatre.