Volta Labs

UDAYAN UMAPATHI: I'm Udayan, co-founder and CEO of Volta Labs.

WILL LANGFORD: My name is Will Langford. I'm co-founder and head of engineering at Volta labs.

UDAYAN UMAPATHI: A few years ago, I worked at a synthetic biology company building automation for synthesizing DNA and RNA. And I noticed some problems in the space, specifically as it relates to scaling up automation from the center of biology. And, since then, I've been fascinated by the idea that you could build automation ground-up. And so I went to the MIT Media Lab to explore and ask this question and find solutions, and ultimately settled out on working on this piece of technology that revolves around manipulating small volume liquids using electric field.

WILL LANGFORD: My research was centered around this crazy idea-- all of life is assembled from 20 amino acids. Why can't we do the same thing in engineering? I went about trying to build integrated machines and robots from a small set of millimeter-scale parts. Ultimately, found that I was trying to make engineering more like biology. And I see Volta as an opportunity to really flip that and tackle some problems in automation to allow biology to be treated more like engineering-- to give biologists tools to manipulate liquids and biological reactions at a smaller scale and a higher throughput scale.

Sequencing costs have plummeted even faster than Moore's law. That's opening up large markets in the sequencing space, but a lot of that neglects what comes upfront of sequencing, which is how you get from a DNA sample-- like saliva-- and convert that into something that can be put on the sequencer. And that whole space-- sample prep-- those costs have largely stagnated and is quickly becoming the bottleneck in more widespread sequencing adoption.

In a conventional liquid-handling machine is a large boxy robot that is, basically, a moving arm that has many pipette tips. And the way it works is by picking up liquids, moving them to other instruments that are placed on the deck, passing samples between those instruments-- and so to do a conventional sample prep conventionally requires a whole handful of instruments that all need to be coordinated. They all have separate data silos and are not well-integrated yet.

The opportunity that we see here is-- this kind of digital microfluidics that we're pursuing enables a much more end-to-end approach where you pipette samples on at the start of the workflow and can go all the way through to sequencing ready end-products.

UDAYAN UMAPATHI: And we do that by stitching an assortment of different functionalities on this core piece of technology that Will was talking about, which involves manipulating samples, reagents, using-- in a droplet form-- using electrowinning.

We are really trying to make biology into an engineering principle, and this sort of comes from the background Will has, and I have, and many of the team members bring. And I think something that sort of ties us all together is this fact that biology is a fairly complex system. And to be able to tackle the system, you need to have a systems perspective that cuts across many, many disciplines, and I think that all of us on our team currently embody that. And you'll probably see this shift as we are starting to see biology infiltrating more of our lives and more companies like Volta coming to emerge as this new type of biotechnology company. It is a necessity. It is inevitable that more engineers and more system-thinkers and more people who want to build tools to engineer biology better-- to start and/or join and build companies like ours.

One of the things I think Volta has done really well is keeping the customers in our design development cycle. And we have had customers who take the archetype of a economic lab to a biomedical research facility, to cancer research institutions, biotechnology companies, so on and so forth. And so our current focus and the way we are deploying the first suite of products is-- first, get it in the hands of a few early adopters. And we are currently looking for early adopters who will use our solution for sequencing sample preparation. These customers are, typically, in the shape of research labs-- be it in the industry or in the academia.

We work best with customers who see value in not just one application, but many different applications-- but starting with sequencing sample preparation.