Cost-effective automated equipment for life sciences and healthcare laboratories

Objetivo

"Decision making in Life Science and Healthcare sector (LSH) is mainly based on laboratory tests results; errors result in up to €27.3B worth of economic damage globally or can have devastating effect such as loss of lives. Automation of laboratory operations is a one-way street for LSH laboratories in order to deal with the high volume of tests demanded and provide fast and accurate results; however, the solutions suggested should also meet their tight budgets.

The objective of LiST project, which is currently positioned at TRL6, is to bring into the market a variety of cost-effective automated laboratory equipment (LiST products) all based on a common robotic platform (List platform). The innovative List platform will be able to fit different groups of specific parts (LiST tools), with each group/tool designed to perform a single application related to sample handling (SH) before or after sample storage. SH applications include basic but time- and manpower-consuming tasks that, if automated, can considerably increase laboratories' productivity and efficiency. The use of an ""one-for-all"" platform will reduce development costs by 60% (€160K vs. current €200-500K - only the development of the specific tools will be required) and will help us provide our customers with 15% cheaper (€9,000 vs. current €11,000) automated equipment in less time (time-to-market 6-12 vs. 24 months).

HTA is a leading Italian engineering and manufacturing company in the business of scientific instrumentation to laboratories, since 25 years. Having already successfully established ""one-for-all"" robotic platforms in the analytical market we are now confident that the same business plan would triumph in a rapidly developing and open to automation market like LSH. The total investment of LiST is €1.15M and the average profit gain will be €0.95M/year thus the pay back of the project will be only 1.2 years after its commercialization.

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