The growth of the Life Sciences and Healthcare (LSH) sector is closely tied to global health care expenditures which, in the successive years, are expected to be fuelled by increasing demand from an aging population and the prevalence of chronic and communicable diseases. At the same time, these trends pose significant challenges to LSH which, besides the continuously increasing workload, they have to deal with stricter legislation and the need for quick and accurate results by the healthcare system, private companies and governments.
To face these challenges, but also their tight budgets and limited resources, LSH laboratories turn to cost-effective automated solutions to increase productivity and reduce analysis time. Existing alternative solutions for small labs include manual methods or semi-automatic equipment, while automated solutions are currently affordable only by big labs. HTA therefore believes that this serves as a large market opportunity and potential for the company to grow.
The overall objective of LiST project 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 innovation of the LiST platform lies in its ability to fit different groups of specific parts (LiST tools), with each group/tool designed to perform a single application related to sample handling before or after sample storage. Therefore, each LiST product will consist of the LiST platform + one LiST tool. The use of the same robotic platform for all LiST products will reduce development costs and will help us provide the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with cheaper automated equipment in less time. LiST products will make automation of various basic but time- and manpower-consuming tasks affordable to all LSH laboratories.
