Ms. Heron: Picoliter was formed about three and a half years ago to develop a new technology that uses ultrasound to move small volumes of liquid. Biologists want to reduce the amount of sample they use in each experiment, but there was no technology for reliably transferring low nanoliter and picoliter amounts of many different samples. (A nanoliter is 1/1,000 of a cc, a picoliter is 1/1,000th of a nanoliter.) Several companies have been working for a long time with various technologies, such as ink-jet approaches, for transferring small amounts of liquids and they just hit a wall at between 10 and 50 nanoliters. The problem is that when you try to move nanoliter amounts of liquid with these traditional approaches you get into issues with small nozzles that clog. They have been putting more and more effort into these approaches and getting less and less out. So it was clear that a new technology was needed if people were going to be able to reduce their assay volumes and save money. The founders of Picoliter were aware of the idea of using sound to move small droplets of liquid. It had been tested by IBM in the early seventies, as a way to do printing. However it turns out it is more suitable for biological liquid transfer and probably isn't the right approach for traditional printing for a variety of reasons. So Picoliter was founded in May 2000 and there was initial work on making DNA arrays and the basic research to make the technology appropriate for biological transfers. The product strategy has evolved over a period of time. About a year and a half ago we decided the first product should be a system for transferring compounds that pharmaceutical companies have in their compound collections. These are the compounds they want to test to see which is the next blockbuster drug. So that's the product that we just introduced, the Echo 550. So parallel to the formation of Picoliter Inc., a company called Labcyte was started to take a group of liquid handling instruments that are manufactured in Japan, to distribute them and help adapt them for the worldwide market. These products are very solid, reliable instruments. They are very flexible; you can adapt them for different volumes. They are very small footprints, which is something that's important for saving space in laboratories. I had always felt Picoliter needed to have more instruments that customers would find attractive and having access to more products would allow us to build out a sales force more quickly. When I found Labcyte, which is a local company, it seemed to be a great fit with complementary products, but similar cultures. We decided to use the name Labcyte for the combined company because it's more indicative of the mission for the new company ' to dramatically improve how laboratory scientists handle liquids.
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