We've all been there before. You're working on a big project, the lab team needs to collect data, and it takes 36-hours of constant prepping and babysitting. Heck, I used to work in a lab working on creating novel bacteria capable of metabolizing wood sugars such as xylose into renewable chemicals. We would draw straws to see who would skip afternoon class to prepare production runs and then stay overnight to sample the bioreactors (somehow I seemed to get a disproportionate amount of short straws...). It's too late for me, but perhaps you can be saved.

OpenTrons (@OpenTrons_) launched a Kickstarter campaign today for the OT.One, an affordable liquid handling robot for biotech. It has the potential to replace liquid handling robots costing tens of thousands of dollars with a substantially more affordable integrated platform consisting of software, hardware, reagents, and the like. SynBioBeta interviewed OpenTrons co-founder Will Canine (@willcanine) to get the scoop on the innovative platform.

What is OpenTrons?

OpenTrons is an open-source rapid prototyping platform for biotechnology. We are bringing the digital fabrication workflow to the life-science lab with our affordable, open lab robots and the Mix.Bio peer-to-peer protocol development community.

Where did OpenTrons come from?

Chiu Chau has been working with lab automation equipment for over fifteen years. He built the first OpenTrons prototype with Nick Wagner because the robots available today are too expensive and too closed to innovation.

I have been a member of Genspace, Brooklyn's open lab, for over two years, and I have a masters degree in product development and emerging technology from ITP at NYU. I was eager to merge my experience with digital fabrication -- 3D printers, laser cutters, etc -- with the protocols I was learning to do by hand at Genspace. Needless to say, when Chiu and Nick put their first prototype up on the DIYBio listserv (which I read religiously) I was super excited to meet them! That was about a year ago, and we have been working together ever since to develop OpenTrons Labworks Inc. and build 21st century biotech tools!

What is the OT.One?

The OT.One is a personal liquid handling robot.

https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/assets/002/806/966/666115a077e23114fd1a523168839ed2_h264_high.mp4

Source: OpenTrons.

Lab automation equipment today is like computers the 1960s -- big mainframe machines that technicians have to reprogram every time they want to run a different job. From some of the stories I've heard, a punch-card system like the computers of yore might actually be preferable to what some labs put up with today! The OT.One is a solution to that problem, giving researchers a flexible, personal automated workflow. And it is just the beginning -- OpenTrons is building an open, modular automation platform so people can easily add tools like a centrifuge or incubator and run all types of protocols. The OT.One robot is the foundation of that ecosystem.

How did OpenTrons develop the OT.One?

OpenTrons is a Lean Hardware Startup out of Haxlr8r, a hardware accelerator in Shenzhen, China. We joined Haxlr8r at the beginning of the summer, and since then we have developed three generations of prototype. While in Shenzhen, the center of the global hardware and electronics supply-chain, we also established a robust sourcing and manufacturing network for building reliable robots and scaling up production -- while maintaining a very affordable price.

In addition to our Kickstarter crowd-funding for the initial OT.One production run, we have closed a seed round to finance scale-up of operations. Around the New Year we will establish a front-office in New York City, where we will be developing our front-end software, doing customer support, and working with the biotech community. The three of us will be splitting time between Shenzhen and NYC, and we expect to grow the team in both places as well.

The OT.One is being called the most affordable lab automation platform in history. What do comparable platforms currently cost?

There is a robotic pipetting arm that uses hand-micropipettes for around $15,000. The faster three-axis robots basically start at $25,000, though budget options exist for closer to $10,000. But that does not include additional fees for software, support, proprietary upgrades, etc. OT.Ones will start retailing at $3,000 in Spring 2015. On our Kickstarter, robots start at $2,000 with delivery beginning in April 2015!

Professional grade three-axis motor control has become inexpensive with off-the-shelf technology thanks to the proliferation of maker-scale digital fabrication equipment like 3D printers and CNC mills. OpenTrons is leveraging the maker trend to make quality lab robots orders of magnitude more affordable than ever before.

What features does the OT.One have? Are upgrades available?

The basic OT.One has a 100% aluminum deck with a 15 SPE well plate capacity. It comes with a single attachment for standard hand micropipette and measures 2ft x 2ft x 2ft. On our Kickstarter, you can include a Starter Kit for +$100 that includes a single-channel p200 micropipette, an OT.MagWash station (which lets you automate magnetic microbead washes), and a Synbiota "Hello World" Genomikon kit.

The +$500 Pro Upgrade includes a second mount for a standard manual micropipette (letting you run jobs that require two different sized micropipettes), an eight-channel p200 micropipette, and an on-board camera mounted to the gantry.

A key piece of the platform is Mix.Bio, the peer-to-peer protocol development platform. How will Mix.Bio deliver value to users?

Mix.Bio is the web interface for designing, sharing, and running protocols for OpenTrons. The key was to make it as simple as possible to develop complicated lab protocols. The drag-and-drop design interface does just that!

But Mix.Bio is also the first web community for the peer-to-peer development of automated life-science protocols. We hope to see the rise of things like the Linux of DNA transformations, or the Arduino of protein assays. These workhorse protocols have the potential to be more robust than anything a single institution could develop themselves, while staying free for anyone to use.

Source: OpenTrons.

Why did you decide to develop an open-source platform?

The short answer: because everyone together can do more than all of us alone.

The 21st century is characterized by the frictionless sharing of information, but our best tool for solving 21st century problems -- biotechnology -- still has high barriers to information flow and knowledge transfer. By making an open-source platform for automated protocol execution, we break down many of the barriers to reproducibility and enable collaboration on a vast scale.

Fundamentally, open-source is about trust. We want scientists to know the equipment they are working with and trust it does what they need. I think that access to the source code, design files, and bill of materials should be expected of scientific equipment.

Next it is about autonomy. We want researchers to be able to work on their own machines with confidence. While we are happy to offer support at several levels of engagement, individuals should be empowered to modify their own machines as they need. Which leads me to the next point -- creating an open ecosystem for lab automation. By being open-source, we give other developers the ability to make the applications they need without re-inventing the wheel. We hope others will join us to build an ecosystem of inter-operable open lab robots, data analysis instruments, sample storage solutions, and more.

Finally, there is no better way to make life-science research reproducible than basing it on a common, open, and affordable experiment execution platform. Artisanal research, as I would classify most of the manual labor heavy labs out there today, often makes transferring processes, knowledge, and discoveries between labs virtually impossible. Fundamentally, both OpenTrons and open-source are about putting powerful tools in people's hands and enabling collaborative innovation.

Who should be interested in owning the OT.One?

Anyone working with biology! We hope that our users will include professional researchers tired of moving around liquid by hand, startups looking to accelerate their product development, and independent biodevelopers that want to try out an idea at Genspace or another open lab.

Are there any commercial partners for the Kickstarter project?

We are working with Synbiota to provide our Kickstarter backers with a "Hello World" kit to run on their new OT.One. Lots of our backers will be folks with very little experience with biotech, and we want to get them up-and-running with synthetic biology as quickly as possible.

The Synbiota Kit includes a set of Genomikon building blocks to build simple red fluorescent protein plasmid for E. coli. We also included an OT.MagWash station in the kit so you can automate the magnetic microbead wash steps of the Genomikon assembly protocol on an OT.One. Going forward, we are excited to work with Synbiota's worldwide network of biodevelopers.

Interested in learning more?

OpenTrons is helping to build the foundation of the synthetic biology field by arming individuals with affordable, quality tools that enable innovation. The OT.One could smash the barriers to entry for rapid prototyping robots and platforms -- and unleash a wave of creative inventions and breakthroughs. To support OpenTrons and the OT.One visit their Kickstarter project page. To see the OT.One in person and speak with Will Canine face-to-face, swing by the OpenTrons exhibit at SynBioBeta SF 2014 on November 14th.