Labcyte Brand Guidelines: Echo Acoustic Liquid Handling, Sunnyvale & Beckman Coulter

A Silicon Valley start-up with a sound idea.

Labcyte was a California company built around one idea: moving tiny amounts of liquid with sound. A 2005 company profile in MIT Technology Review lists it as Labcyte, formerly Picoliter, with its headquarters in Sunnyvale and a founding date of 2003. The same profile says its founder and chief technical officer had previously worked on new printing technologies at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News named him in 2019 as Richard Ellson, chief technology officer and a founder of Labcyte.

The printing background matters to the story. Labcyte’s technology, which it called acoustic droplet ejection, or ADE, uses focused acoustic energy — ultrasound — to lift a droplet from a liquid and send it to a target, rather than drawing the liquid up into a pipette tip. MIT Technology Review described the company in 2005 as having developed a proprietary way of using focused acoustics to transfer droplets down to 2.5 nanolitres, and said that by transferring compounds directly into assay plates the method did away with tips, washing and intermediate dilutions.

The intended customers were laboratories that screen large numbers of compounds. The 2005 profile set Labcyte against a background of drug-discovery groups turning to miniaturisation to keep costs down, and noted the company’s own statement that several large pharmaceutical companies and universities were already using its systems. It also said Labcyte expected to take its acoustic technology into genomics and proteomics.

By the time of its sale the company had moved to San Jose: Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News described it in January 2019 as a privately held company based there.

The Echo and the inverted plate.

Labcyte sold its technology under the name Echo. Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the Society of Chemical Industry, explained in a 2016 feature that acoustic droplet ejection sends precisely sized droplets of a source fluid onto a microplate, a microscope slide or another surface, and that the liquid stays in the inverted source container — typically a microlitre-scale well plate — because of surface tension, which Labcyte’s then chief executive, Mark Fischer-Colbrie, described to the magazine as “stronger than gravity.”

The same feature set out how the company saw its own contribution. Fischer-Colbrie said Labcyte had found a way to use sound not only to eject the droplet but also to “interrogate” the fluid first, measuring it to decide how much power to apply so that a wide range of liquids could be transferred automatically, whatever their viscosity. Chemistry & Industry reported that Labcyte patented this dynamic fluid analysis in 2011. The magazine listed uses including combination drug screening, the assembly of DNA constructs for synthetic biology, microbiome analysis and protein crystallography, and noted that in June 2016 Labcyte had extended a collaboration with the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland at the University of Helsinki to use the Echo in cancer research. Fischer-Colbrie told the magazine that more than 400 published papers showed the technology in use.

Labcyte kept developing the range. In October 2018, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News reported, it launched the Echo 650 and Echo 655 liquid handlers, microplate-based systems working in transfers of 2.5 nanolitres, which carried over features first introduced in the 650T and 655T models.

Robots, plates and benches.

Laboratory automation is sold to scientists, and its makers tend to present it in a laboratory register: white or pale grey instrument decks, pipetting heads lined up over microplates, racks of tips and plates picked out in colour, and clean benches with little else on them. Product photographs usually show the machine from the front or from above, so that the layout of the deck, the channels and the labware can be read at a glance.

Software is part of the picture. Pipetting robots and plate handlers are run from method editors and touchscreens, and makers often show those screens next to the hardware, with protocol steps, plate maps and progress bars set in plain sans-serif type. The pairing lets a single page show both the instrument and the way it is run.

Many of the companies began with a single hand instrument and grew towards automation. Hamilton’s history starts with a glass microliter syringe of the late 1940s; INTEGRA Biosciences grew from a Zurich firm founded in 1965 into a maker of electronic pipettes and benchtop robots. Acquisitions of smaller specialists, in microdosing or in digital microfluidics for sequencing, have pushed the same businesses towards ever smaller volumes.

The trade meets at fairs and conferences such as SLAS, the meetings of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, and analytica in Munich, where makers show their instruments to laboratory buyers. Several of the makers in this round are Swiss or have Swiss sites, while others are based in the United States or the United Kingdom; their guides set those shared conventions against very different histories and owners.

From independent start-up to a Danaher product line.

Labcyte’s independence ended in January 2019. On 30 January that year Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News reported that Beckman Coulter had acquired the company for an undisclosed price, in a deal that expanded the buyer’s laboratory automation business. The buyer was Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, the Indianapolis-based research unit of Beckman Coulter, which is itself part of Danaher.

The magazine was clear about what would happen to the company: Labcyte would be absorbed into Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, part of Danaher’s life-sciences group of companies. Jonathan Pratt, then president of Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, said in the announcement that Labcyte’s products complemented the unit’s existing liquid-handling and laboratory automation business. Richard Ellson said in the same announcement that acoustic liquid handling was becoming “the backbone” of high-throughput, automated laboratory work.

Labcyte therefore no longer trades as an independent company: since 2019 its business has been part of Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. Its story runs from a Sunnyvale start-up, listed by MIT Technology Review as founded in 2003, through the Echo 650 series of 2018, to absorption into a group whose own history began with a pH meter in 1935. Beckman Coulter Life Sciences also makes the Biomek liquid handlers, a line the Science History Institute dates back to the Biomek 1000 of 1986, so the acoustic and tip-based approaches to moving liquid now sit within the same Danaher business.

For a design guide, Labcyte shows how a single technical idea — sound in place of a pipette tip — can carry a brand from a start-up to a larger group. Compare Beckman Coulter, which absorbed it, and Molecular Devices, another Danaher life-sciences business. For this guide we use a teal, a mint and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Labcyte’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.