Today is a big day for Trilobio. We are officially announcing Trilobot One and Trilobio OS, which together comprise Trilobio’s unified platform for fully automated biology. This is a major milestone for Trilobio and is the culmination of years of hard work from our team. We also think today will end up being a major inflection point in the industry and move biology closer to a future in which lab automation unlocks the immense potential of the field.
Our singular focus as a company, the mission that aligns all of our actions, is to unleash the potential of biology through step function improvements in the automation layer. Our goal is to automate over 90% of manual processes in the lab so biologists can focus on what brought them to the field to begin with: developing therapeutics, cures, and other life-improving and life-saving technologies. As biologists ourselves, this is what motivates us every single day as we build Trilobio. As we’ve said before, we believe the key to unlocking rapid innovation in biology is the technology layer, which until today has not kept pace with the requirements, hopes, and dreams of the biologists it is supposed to empower.
Here’s what biologists can expect from the Trilobio platform, beginning today:
Lab-in-a-Box: Biologists face many challenges when automating their labs, two of which are 1) connecting many incompatible, single-purpose devices together and 2) managing the space constraints of a biology lab. We’ve designed each Trilobot to hold multiple tools inside its small footprint and automatically change between these tools seamlessly, no mechanical or software integration required. Each tool performs the function of a different lab device: gripper, pipettor, tube manipulator, and more…and a Trilobot can use these tools right after a biologist places them on the Trilobot tool rack. This makes each Trilobot a space-efficient, feature-rich, and cost-effective lab automation platform.
Automate Big Things: Research is fully automated through the flexible Trilobio OS protocol designer. Simply click and drag steps, add new ones, or modify parameters without having to rewrite upstream and downstream steps. We also automate the placement of samples across all labware and parallelize multiple protocols within or across Trilobots. Other platforms require painstaking specification of even obvious details, like picking up the tips that are actually compatible with the pipette tool, selecting the appropriate tool for the task at hand, or specifying each specific well into which liquids should be deposited. The algorithms that power Trilobio OS abstract all that away from the biologist, saving biologists a lot of time.
Automate Little Things: There are lots of small tasks that biologists have become accustomed to performing in the lab that they shouldn’t have to do. We’ve developed innovative features that eliminate these chores so biologists can focus on science. For example, we’ve developed the first-ever fully autocalibrated platform: the Trilobot, the Trilobot tools, the positions of connected Trilobots, and all of the plasticware on a Trilobot are calibrated automatically by our solution. No extra work from the biologist is required. Automating these little tasks saves biologists hours of tedious work so they can focus on research.
Scalable: As labs develop and grow, their lab automation platforms should scale with their needs. This is challenging for biologists today, who need to manually swap tools, buy and integrate entirely new robotics capabilities, or rewrite their lab protocols from scratch to accommodate protocol changes. With Trilobio, biologists can add new tools to their Trilobot fleet by just placing them onto the tool rack. Our robotic arm can then seamlessly interface with and automatically swap between them. Biologists can connect Trilobots together in a few seconds with their intermodular latches, drastically increasing research throughput. As protocols scale up, changes made to parameters in the beginning of a protocol are carried through the rest of the protocol automatically. Our platform is instantly scalable and reconfigurable.
Affordable: One of the biggest challenges I faced when starting my own labs in the past was getting lab equipment. There is always a price vs. quality trade-off, one that is incredibly frustrating for biologists. Our work depends on reliability, accuracy and precision, but is constrained by our budgets. We can either have the best tool and lots of manual processes, or we can have more devices that we do not trust. This tradeoff is taken as an iron law, but to achieve our vision of automating the entire biology lab for everyone, our platform must be both high-performing and available at a reasonable price point. That’s exactly what we built - it might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. Today, we have customers in academic labs, synthetic biology startups, and mature biotech companies. We support biology at every stage of its journey with a reliable, precise, and accurate platform so we can fully automate biology for everyone.
If this vision of what biology could be speaks to you, we’d love to talk - we want to work with people who share our vision of how technology can support biology and take the field to places we’ve only dreamed of.
You can schedule a live demo to see the Trilobot and Trilobio OS in action by clicking the button below.
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