From the assembly line to the black light lab, the automation revolution upstream of the life sciences

Commercialization: Find buyers and form benchmarking cases

After the application of technology, finding benchmark customers is the last step to open up the closed loop of business.

Ideal is very plump, reality is very bony. Due to the high cost of overall laboratory automation construction (dominated by imports), customers with both rigid demand and payment ability are mainly concentrated in large CRO, CDMO companies, pharmaceutical companies, laboratory departments and third-party medical laboratories of large hospitals, as well as some government-funded benchmarked laboratory projects. But these customers generally lack interest in local brands.

A biological drug CDMO company innovative biological drug research and development and pharmaceutical center IT director told 36kR, "At present, because of the domestic robot equipment dead corner design, in addition to domestic alternative and much cheaper, can not find other reasons to use, not to mention the big factory is not poor money." However, he also said, "If it does not involve the core GMP part (some equipment with high precision requirements), it should be localized, and it will slowly penetrate."

It is said that in some non-high-end technology fields, Chinese brands already have significant advantages, such as automated pipette workstations, biological sample storage, detection probes, etc., which are not only much cheaper, but also easy to use; However, in some high-end automation equipment involving biology, computers, medicine, machinery industry and other fields of patents and technology, there are some upstream parts have not yet achieved localization, domestic brands are in a "stuck neck" state, the future in the supply chain or face challenges, will become an important card point for domestic brands to break through.

In addition, a necessary condition for the production line to move from the research and development stage to the laboratory application is that the production line is standardized and replicable. However, in the field of life science laboratory automation, customers are small, scattered and immature, "non-standard, small batch, multi-variety", "can not raise demand" has become a "common disease" in the industry. A startup company said that a customer had bluntly said: "I don't know what my needs are, your team will first stay in the field, talk to all departments and all links of people, to help us transform it."

To this end, local laboratory automation manufacturers often have to play the role of customer program planning and industry leaders, and need to polish products through benchmarking customers/cases to prepare for subsequent large-scale applications. A typical Youmeijia technology built its own Kunpeng laboratory and gradually accumulated benchmark customers through exploring cutting-edge research in life science. When asked why they want to build their own laboratory, MGI Technology CEO Huang Yuqing said, "to build such a laboratory investment is very big, the operation is very difficult, and the cycle of looking for customer cooperation is too long, it is better to do it themselves."

Huixiang Technology is cooperating with AI pharmaceutical company Insi Intelligence to build an intelligent robot drug research and development laboratory to explore fully automated applications in unmanned scenarios. It is reported that six companies of the same type came to bid for the order, and peers evaluated, "Even if you have to accept the order at a loss, the investment in the early stage is worth it."

And for what is really a good product, we also have a basic consensus: that is, the production line can make money, the model can be copied, "others can't do it" (IP), the subsequent cost is reduced, the deployment cycle is shorter, and it can be expanded to other types of customers, changing the market pattern. In this regard, a typical case is the Falcon series, a small flexible intelligent delivery system developed by Novo.

Three, is it worth it?

Early commercialization is difficult for every entrepreneur to face the problem, investors are also betting on a "life science laboratory intelligent" future. And when will it come?

The next 5-10 years will be concentrated

Liu Wei, managing partner of Zhang Ke Lingyi Venture Capital, said that the CRO industry can be likened to the development of this industry will be divided into three cycles: the first wave, the industry from scratch, "there are companies dedicated to do this thing", as in recent years, Xuanjian Technology, Benyao Technology and other companies focused on robot intelligent products have emerged; In the second wave, a group of companies began to be willing to pay, constantly run in trial and error, some companies to develop and grow, the market began to reshuffle; Finally, find out the demands of the first batch of companies, solve the universal problem, and then provide standard products, rapid replication.

"The first wave has just begun, and the opportunity is the biggest, and the next five to 10 years will be the stage of acceleration and even concentrated outbreak, when the market will have universal, cost-effective and independent intellectual property products." Moreover, for investors, the valuation of the upstream of the biomedical industry is also relatively reasonable, and it is an investment theme given by The Times.