BD, Opentrons Labs enter multi-year collaboration to join cell analysis, automation tech

Under a multi-year deal, medtech company BD and lab automation specialist Opentrons Labworks are joining forces to leverage their respective technologies in a bid to speed up and improve disease research and drug development.

The two plan to merge the BD Rhapsody system for cell analysis with the Opentrons Flex platform to allow scientists to perform hands-free workflows as part of single-cell multiomics experiments, according to an Oct. 8 release.

With this collaboration, the companies aim to make it easier and more cost-effective for labs across the globe to perform single-cell sequencing at scale.

A key component of the partnership involves the development of an "automation-compatible module" for BD's Rhapsody systems to allow certain R&D procedures to be automated.

Neither the length of the contract nor the financials of the pact were disclosed.

“By revealing the multiple layers of biological information within cells, the field of single-cell multiomics is quickly transforming research in oncology, immunology and beyond—and automation can further accelerate adoption, especially in translational and biopharma settings,” Ranga Partha, a BD vice president, said in the release. “By integrating robotics with our instruments—including the BD Rhapsody HT Xpress system, which enables million-cell studies—we are helping scientists access potentially life-changing insights with greater speed, scale and reproducibility.”

For Opentrons, the collaboration comes a little over eight months after the company inked a similar deal with Merck KGaA’s subsidiary MilliporeSigma to automate assay kits using the Flex platform. Financial details of that agreement also weren’t disclosed.