In April, South Korea became the first country in the world to pass a standalone synthetic-biology law, effectively signing a blank national check for anyone who can speed up wet-lab work. Shin Sang thinks he can fill in the amount.
At 37, Shin is a cancer biologist by training who spent years in hospital labs dealing with expensive, unreliable robots running outdated software that felt “stuck in the Windows 95 era,” as he told Korea Biomedical Review.
In 2021, he turned that frustration into ABLE Labs, now a 26-person company that builds compact liquid-handling systems designed to feel more like smartphone apps than industrial machinery.
His answer is speed: machines that move quickly, a company that iterates even faster, and cloud software that lets scientists launch protocols without writing code or hiring an engineer.
That flexibility, he said, is what sets ABLE apart from larger competitors like Hamilton, Tecan, and Beckman Coulter, whose systems dominate high-end labs but often require specialized scripting and long lead times for customization.
The company has raised 5.3 billion won (roughly $3.9 million) so far and is now chasing another five, betting that faster, simpler lab automation can go from niche to necessity.
A five-week sprint, four weeks short
The urgency came into focus last month when Samsung Biologics unveiled a five-week organoid-based drug-screening service with Samsung Medical Center. Four of those weeks are still spent hand-culturing patient-derived organoids.
Shin posted on LinkedIn the same morning: “What’s striking is how familiar this shift feels,” he wrote, recalling a decade-old project at the same hospital.
Back in 2012, as a junior researcher, he ran eight brain tumor samples against 60 drugs and seven dose levels -- a 16,000-well matrix. The hospital had just bought a used liquid handler for 250 million won, but, he said, “the software felt like Windows 95 while the world was using iPhone 4."
Finishing the run by hand left his wrists aching. “That was when I realised automation had to be simpler and cheaper,” he said. “Otherwise scientists just give up and go back to pipettes.”
“If we automate the routine physical work, people can focus on designing, validating, discovering,” Shin said. “That’s evolution. Experimental design can be AI-assisted now, so why are researchers still doing manual work that wrecks their wrists?”
Before launching ABLE, Shin joined the small automation firm Advanced Technology Inc., where he built a prototype that kept cell cultures alive, fed, and monitored without human touch. ABLE is rebuilding that idea with cloud control and AI optimisation so that growing organoids, dosing them, and analysing the data become one continuous loop.
Samsung Biologics told Korea Biomedical Review that full automation “is part of the company’s core strategy” but will arrive in phases. Shin sees opportunity in the gap. “That means massive labor input,” he said. “If automation is where the value is, then this is where we build it.”
From the start, Shin has been playing the long game. His original idea was to build a full “robotics cloud lab”: a facility that could take in digital work orders, run them on remote robots, and push results back through an API, a tool that allows different software systems to share information.
Early Korean investors balked at the price tag, Shin said. By their estimates, it would cost at least 100 billion won, and some questioned whether the concept belonged in Boston rather than Seoul. “So we started smaller,” he said. First came liquid-handling robots. Then came the software.
NOTABLE, ABLE’s first commercial robot, is a compact benchtop platform with 12 deck positions and two independently controlled pipette slots. It supports drag-and-drop protocol design and real-time data integration, aimed at labs that want automation without custom coding.
SUITABLE, its larger sibling, doubles the deck space and runs eight span pipettes from 1 to 1,000 µL. Both rely on Windy, a micro-services software stack that lives in the cloud, stores every experimental move as code and lets users tweak parameters from a browser.
In other words, it’s automation built like a SaaS product: software that runs in the cloud, updates continuously, and doesn’t need a manual. And it’s designed for scientists, not engineers.
“The issue with most systems is that you need an engineer to custom-code each protocol,” Shin said. “That takes time and money, so unless a lab is very well funded, they often won’t even try.” What sets ABLE apart, he added, is that its system is designed so users can create and modify protocols themselves. “Of course, we also build and provide protocols,” he said.
<Read full article >
출처 : Kim Ji-hye KBR(https://www.koreabiomed.com)
In April, South Korea became the first country in the world to pass a standalone synthetic-biology law, effectively signing a blank national check for anyone who can speed up wet-lab work. Shin Sang thinks he can fill in the amount.
At 37, Shin is a cancer biologist by training who spent years in hospital labs dealing with expensive, unreliable robots running outdated software that felt “stuck in the Windows 95 era,” as he told Korea Biomedical Review.
In 2021, he turned that frustration into ABLE Labs, now a 26-person company that builds compact liquid-handling systems designed to feel more like smartphone apps than industrial machinery.
His answer is speed: machines that move quickly, a company that iterates even faster, and cloud software that lets scientists launch protocols without writing code or hiring an engineer.
That flexibility, he said, is what sets ABLE apart from larger competitors like Hamilton, Tecan, and Beckman Coulter, whose systems dominate high-end labs but often require specialized scripting and long lead times for customization.
The company has raised 5.3 billion won (roughly $3.9 million) so far and is now chasing another five, betting that faster, simpler lab automation can go from niche to necessity.
A five-week sprint, four weeks short
The urgency came into focus last month when Samsung Biologics unveiled a five-week organoid-based drug-screening service with Samsung Medical Center. Four of those weeks are still spent hand-culturing patient-derived organoids.
Shin posted on LinkedIn the same morning: “What’s striking is how familiar this shift feels,” he wrote, recalling a decade-old project at the same hospital.
Back in 2012, as a junior researcher, he ran eight brain tumor samples against 60 drugs and seven dose levels -- a 16,000-well matrix. The hospital had just bought a used liquid handler for 250 million won, but, he said, “the software felt like Windows 95 while the world was using iPhone 4."
Finishing the run by hand left his wrists aching. “That was when I realised automation had to be simpler and cheaper,” he said. “Otherwise scientists just give up and go back to pipettes.”
“If we automate the routine physical work, people can focus on designing, validating, discovering,” Shin said. “That’s evolution. Experimental design can be AI-assisted now, so why are researchers still doing manual work that wrecks their wrists?”
Before launching ABLE, Shin joined the small automation firm Advanced Technology Inc., where he built a prototype that kept cell cultures alive, fed, and monitored without human touch. ABLE is rebuilding that idea with cloud control and AI optimisation so that growing organoids, dosing them, and analysing the data become one continuous loop.
Samsung Biologics told Korea Biomedical Review that full automation “is part of the company’s core strategy” but will arrive in phases. Shin sees opportunity in the gap. “That means massive labor input,” he said. “If automation is where the value is, then this is where we build it.”
From the start, Shin has been playing the long game. His original idea was to build a full “robotics cloud lab”: a facility that could take in digital work orders, run them on remote robots, and push results back through an API, a tool that allows different software systems to share information.
Early Korean investors balked at the price tag, Shin said. By their estimates, it would cost at least 100 billion won, and some questioned whether the concept belonged in Boston rather than Seoul. “So we started smaller,” he said. First came liquid-handling robots. Then came the software.
NOTABLE, ABLE’s first commercial robot, is a compact benchtop platform with 12 deck positions and two independently controlled pipette slots. It supports drag-and-drop protocol design and real-time data integration, aimed at labs that want automation without custom coding.
SUITABLE, its larger sibling, doubles the deck space and runs eight span pipettes from 1 to 1,000 µL. Both rely on Windy, a micro-services software stack that lives in the cloud, stores every experimental move as code and lets users tweak parameters from a browser.
In other words, it’s automation built like a SaaS product: software that runs in the cloud, updates continuously, and doesn’t need a manual. And it’s designed for scientists, not engineers.
“The issue with most systems is that you need an engineer to custom-code each protocol,” Shin said. “That takes time and money, so unless a lab is very well funded, they often won’t even try.” What sets ABLE apart, he added, is that its system is designed so users can create and modify protocols themselves. “Of course, we also build and provide protocols,” he said.
<Read full article >
출처 : Kim Ji-hye KBR(https://www.koreabiomed.com)