♪ [music] ♪ Hi, my name's Paul Lomax, and I'm the Head of Genomics at SPT Labtech. We're really excited to be showing firefly. It's a very compact system, and it's got a lot of capability within that compact footprint.
So, it's got a pipetting system for 384, 96-well plates. It's also got a non-contact dispensing system, and it's very well-set-up for genomics applications, and in particular, NGS library prep. So, we're finding customers don't have space in their labs, they want automation, and this is really a good fit for those customers. Firefly has a 384-well pipetting head that can be used for 384, 96, and also columns.
So, you can do partial plates in 96-well plates or in 384-well plates. It's good for mixing, it's good for things like bead cleanups. It also has a gripper system incorporated, so you can move plates on and off magnets, so, great for bead cleanups.
It also has a non-contact dispensing system. And that's great for dispensing kind of one-to-many reagents. So, a single reagent that you want to put across all wells, so that could be things like ethanol, buffers, enzymes, bead mix. It's great for all of those things. And because it's non-contact, you can use a single syringe for all those dispenses. So it's quite economical.
It's also really great in producing dead volumes, so it's a great combination on a single instrument, to have both that pipetting and dispensing capability. And then on top of that, we've also got incubation and shaking on the system. So, there really is an awful lot of capability on a really small footprint. The firefly is predominantly targeted for genomics applications at the moment.
In the future, we will kind of start to diversify a little bit more, because it is a general liquid handler, but what we're seeing in genomics is that with the cost of sequencing coming down, that's really driving and increasing throughput. So, we're seeing a lot of customers who are working manually at the moment now thinking about moving to automation, and the firefly is a great fit for them.
It's really easy to use, and it's got great capabilities, and enables them to actually move from manual and lower throughputs to higher throughputs. We're also seeing customers who've already got automation wanting to add to their automation fleet, and they're often struggling for space, and it's a really compact unit, so it's something they can generally find a space for in the lab, and it brings them a lot of capability.
So, going forward, you know, we've been shipping units for a little while now, and we're getting really good feedback from our early customers. One of the big features of the software is that there is a collaborative cloud where our customers can share protocols. So, we're starting to see protocols appear on there now.
Our internal applications team are also developing new methods, and adding those to the cloud. So, in the short term, it's going to be great to see those new applications appearing and the ability for our customers to share those between each other, and really, you know, really help foster that global collaboration. The other thing that we are working on, and we'll be releasing early next year, is a firefly+ unit, which is an extension unit that goes onto the side of the existing firefly.
So, there's an upgrade path for existing customers, and that gives them extra storage capacity for tips and plates, and also integrates an on-deck thermocycler. So, for customers who want to have a completely walkaway solution, where it goes direct to PCR reactions, they can do that with the new firefly+.
.jpg)
.jpg)
