Kraken Sense
I was poking around the Internet as you do and came across Kraken Sense and the CALYPSO NGS prep platform. The platform claims to take “raw samples” to “sequence-ready libraries within a remarkable timeframe of under 2 hours”.
The website shows an impressive workflow:
But is a little light on the details.
I therefore decided to go patent hunting and came across this. The patent covered their automated qPCR platform, but I get the impression that the NGS prep system is very much an evolution of this. I think they’ve more or less shoved a sample prep lab in a “little” box:
This seems in stark contrast to the Cepheid (and iSeq/MiSeq/NextSeq2k) approach in which fluid is confined to the cartridge. The most striking differencing being “yea… we’re just gonna stick a whole centrifuge in the thing”.
That “open” fluidic system has clear disadvantages, the most obvious being the potential for contamination1, both between samples and within the lab. But I can see the centrifuge perhaps yielding better material in some scenarios too?
In any case, it’s great to be seeing more efforts in the “sample-to-library” NGS prep space!
Which could cause issues in a clinical/diagnostic context in particular.
Curious how vague their website and brochure is as to the number of samples it can handle at once
Also wonder how many exceptions there are to the pre-packaged reagents - Revvity BioQule makes similar claims but the 70% EtOH must be prepared fresh and there are other reagents that must be pipetted into a plate by the user