Founded in 2005, HighRes Biosolutions designs and constructs robotic systems and lab devices used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies and academic research laboratories. The company, based in Woburn, Massachusetts, provides scientists with integrated systems that are designed to be easily configured and reconfigured, as well as benchtop equipment, software and consumables.

The company was founded when lab automation workers Michael Nichols and Louis Guarracina decided there had to be a better way to do automation than the cumbersome methods in place at the time. According to Mr. Nichols, it took a long time to design, test and implement the lab automation systems purchased from various vendors. “It took several years from the time that you wanted to start the project until you were actually doing research on the systems,” Mr. Nichols said. “It also took a long time to change the system, a lot of resources and a lot of money. The systems were extremely inflexible; we call them monolithic systems.”

Mr. Nichols and Mr. Guarracina’s plan was therefore to find a more flexible way to do automation that would accommodate ever-changing technology. “We designed what we call a docking station,” Mr. Nichols said. “Instead of taking all of your instruments and fastening them down to a table, we put an array of docking stations around the robot. You put your instruments on a mobile cart, and when you want to integrate an instrument all you do is roll the cart up to the docking station; push a foot pedal, which will lift it off the ground, and it will automatically connect the power needed to run the instrument through our scheduling software.” He added that the docking station has “really been our trademark and one of the reasons for our success.” The company’s systems include the MicroStar brand, one of the larger systems that can be 12-, nine- or six-sided, which reflects the number of instruments that can be hooked up to the system at any given time.

HighRes Biosolutions’s technology is based around the idea of integrating different types of instruments around a robotic core. Director of Life Science Technologies Chris Pacheco explained that, for example, a large pharmaceutical company will typically have about 30 million to 50 million different compounds stored, and what HighRes Biosolutions will do is set up a system where the company can have all of its libraries accessible. “The robotic arm can take out a compound plate from the customer’s library and transfer it to an experimental plate. The robotic arm then aids in all other necessary protocols for screening that compound, including incubating, spinning, shaking, washing, reagent addition and endpoint determinations by plate readers.” HighRes Biosolutions does the physical integration of these different types of instruments and writes a single software program. “The user only has a single software interface, but can still utilize a number of different instruments.”

HighRes Biosolutions serves pharmaceutical and drug discovery companies. According to Dr. Pacheco, the company, which employs about 60 people, is growing by about 20%–30% each year and is moving more into life sciences, for which it has been working on genotyping systems. The company is also working on a molecular diagnostics system.