After months of dedicated engineering, we created a working prototype based on a capillary gap staining principle. The advantage of gap staining is that the sample is incubated in a very thin layer of liquid, thus greatly reducing the volume of reagents used, while the exchange of the liquids can be implemented by simply pipetting the new buffer to the top of the staining chamber and letting the gravity draw it in and instantly displace the old buffer. Using this prototype we successfully demonstrated the ability to automate a wide range of protocols, starting from simple IF, IHC, H&E stains and all the way to sophisticated multi-step protocols such as CODEX, RNAscope, IMC etc.

Moreover, we realized that we can make use of OT-2’s heat module and automate protocols that require heated incubations, such as Cas-FISH, Opal and even FFPE antigen retrieval (yes, to our surprise, turns out that one doesn’t really need a pressure cooker). We became the first company to design a gap staining chamber specifically for coverslip-mounted samples, a format commonly found in research applications, which seems to be ignored by other autostainer vendors. We aim to serve the scientific community by enabling the complicated multi-step protocols to be done efficiently and hoping to make tissue auto-staining truly affordable to all.