Molecular Devices Brand Guidelines: A 1983 Stanford Start, the Plate Reader & Danaher

A chemistry professor, his former students and an engineer.

Molecular Devices began in 1983. It was founded by researchers from Stanford University, GEN (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News) reported in April 2019. English Wikipedia’s article on the Stanford chemist Harden M. McConnell says he founded Molecular Devices Corporation that year with three of his former graduate students and postdoctoral researchers — Gillian Humphries, J. Wallace Parce and Dean Hafeman — together with the engineer Calvin Chow, and that he sat on the company’s board from 1983 until 2007. The company’s own website puts it more briefly: it was “founded in 1983 by a leading physical and biophysical chemist.”

The product that made the business was not the one it set out to build. According to GEN, McConnell’s team was at first pursuing a different idea; when that concept failed, McConnell saw that the microplate reader the team had built along the way “could be a commercial product,” as the company’s then president, Greg Milosevich, told the magazine. English Wikipedia dates the first Molecular Devices microplate reader to 1987.

From there the company grew by both invention and purchase. English Wikipedia records that in 1996 it acquired the FLIPR technology from NovelTech Systems of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in 2000 licensed the IonWorks electrophysiology system from Essen Bioscience, also of Ann Arbor. It then bought Universal Imaging Corporation in 2002, Axon Instruments in 2004 and Blueshift Technologies in 2008, adding electrophysiology products, microarray scanners and analysis software, and imaging workstations for cell-based screening. By the time it was sold in 2007 it had more than 1,000 employees, the McConnell article says.

Readers, imagers and the software between them.

Molecular Devices makes laboratory instruments rather than consumer goods, and its names are product families. Its microplate readers include the SpectraMax M5e multi-mode reader; ImageXpress covers automated cell imagers, including the widefield ImageXpress Micro series that English Wikipedia describes and the smaller ImageXpress Pico that GEN covered in 2019; SoftMax Pro is the reader software, whose 7.1 GxP version, released in December 2018, added audit-trail and validation tools, according to GEN. Today the company’s website groups its work under headings such as lab automation, GxP compliance, cellular imaging systems, clone screening and microplate readers.

The company tells its history through firsts. Its president told GEN in 2019 that Molecular Devices developed the first kinetic, real-time microplate reader, the first high-throughput GPCR screening platform and the first low-noise conventional electrophysiology device; those are the company’s claims as reported by the magazine. The most unusual of them concerns space. GEN reported that a Molecular Devices reader was dropped minutes before it was due to be assessed for use on the International Space Station, kept working, and went on to pass the vibration and high-G testing needed to fly; the SpectraMax M5e reader has since been launched to the station twice, and the president described it as the first and so far the only microplate reader in space. The company’s website still links to a “first reader in space” story.

The business also gained from its parent group. GEN reported that in 2018 Molecular Devices took in FortéBio, a division of Pall, which Danaher had acquired in 2013, combining Pall’s label-free screening tools with Molecular Devices’ cell-line selection platforms. The magazine also described an automation team, Advanced Workflow Engineering Solutions, which integrates the company’s instruments with those of other makers. The company says it now has about 1,200 associates and in-house sales, service and support teams working with customers in more than 21 countries, with PhD-level application scientists.

Benches, decks and screens.

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 Sunnyvale to MDS to Danaher.

The company did not stay independent. On 12 February 2007 HospiMedica reported that MDS Inc. of Toronto and Molecular Devices Corporation of Sunnyvale, California, had signed a definitive agreement for MDS to acquire Molecular Devices. MDS planned a new business unit combining Molecular Devices with its MDS Sciex business, and said both brand names would continue within it. English Wikipedia records that the purchase took place in March 2007, making Molecular Devices part of MDS Analytical Technologies.

That arrangement was short-lived. English Wikipedia says that in 2010 MDS repositioned itself and sold its analytical technologies and pharma services businesses, and that in February 2010 Danaher Corporation acquired MDS Analytical Technologies; Molecular Devices has been a Danaher subsidiary since then. The company’s website today says it is “proud to be part of Danaher” and is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, and its footer runs a row of sister companies in the group, among them Beckman Coulter, Leica Microsystems, Pall, Phenomenex and SCIEX.

The Molecular Devices name itself is plain and descriptive, and its website leans on the year of founding, describing the company as helping scientists “since 1983.” Its product families, by contrast, carry coined single-word names — SpectraMax, ImageXpress, SoftMax Pro — alongside FLIPR, the screening technology it acquired in 1996.

For a design guide, Molecular Devices shows how a research start-up’s name can carry through two changes of owner while its product families do much of the naming work. Compare Beckman Coulter, a sister company in the Danaher group, and Labcyte, another lab-automation brand. For this guide we use a deep navy, a mid blue and a soft teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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