Notes on OpenTrons 5-min pitch at HAXLR8R Demo Day

OpenTrons HAXLR8R 5min pitch 11-2014 - livenotes

Will from OpenTrons takes the stage…

Hi.


It’s an open source lab robot for biotech

Mentions carlson curves to legitimize notion that biotech is experiencing crazy growth + innovation

What kind of innovations?
- glowing plants
- animal free leather
- even synbio, which puts medicine into microbes to brew cures like brew beer

But! 21st century challanges outpacing innovation

biotech is still hand-made 

christen ellis expert in phage therapy at huge institute 

spends 70% time doing pipetting

our life science experts spend most of their time doing manual labor

but our robot solves that problem

does your pipetting for you

so biotech researchers can focus on moving their product forward while ot1 does pipetting for you

we’re trying to accelerate design build test cycle for biotech for everyone

and I mean everyone - because of mix.bio.

mix.bio is first solution for peer-to-peer open source protocols

the linux of dna assembly

or the arduino of protein assays

here is tom knight from ginkgo bioworks. They have over 10,000 “samples" going through their lab every day and only 20 lab staff. They have three huge $250 000 tecan lab evos. None of them moved while I was there. because the techs needed that time to set up the software to run the machines

analogy to software like punchcards in 60’s that is run in batch mode by separate ops team from programmer who wrote the code, unlike speedy program-run-test-repeat cycle today (I think he is implying ginkgo is experiencing this negative effect… but unclear how smaller opentrons robots fix it)

opentrons personal liquid handling robot is solution to this problem

2-4 billion dollars is spent on liquid handling (automation) in the USA (what about spent on human liquid handling?)

tecan, thermo, hamilton, Beckman. Built here or switzerland, so $$$. No interoperability. Profit comes from enterprise services and in-person techs 

(He keeps emphasizing open-source)

(and peer-to-peer sharing baked into mix.bio - I think mix.bio is supposed to be the solution to ginkgo’s problem?)

We will be *the* platform for biotech innovation in the 21st century.

Thanks