Atomixel is a life science tools consultancy. Expert support on microfluidic technologies, drug discovery platforms and laboratory automation, from strategy and planning through to execution.

Independent consultancy from someone who has taken a platform from the first experiment to a commercial product. Start a conversation.

The view

The laboratory is being atomised.

For as long as anyone has been buying them, the instrument has been the unit. A box that does one workflow well, bought whole and replaced whole. What is arriving instead is a laboratory assembled from minimally functional units that can be rearranged as the question changes.

That changes what an instrument has to be. It has to be addressable rather than operable. It has to be deterministic before it is flexible. And it has to describe itself to the software that will schedule it, rather than wait for a person to interpret it.

Most of the tools sold today were designed before any of that was true. Atomixel does not build the replacements. I help the teams who do: deciding what the platform is for, defining the product, and getting it to work in customers' hands.

The questions I am brought in to answer

The expensive mistakes in a platform programme are made early and found late: the wrong product defined, the wrong experiment left until month fourteen. My work is finding them while they are still cheap to fix. Clients arrive with one of the questions below, across microfluidics, single cell analysis, drug discovery and laboratory automation, from instrument hardware and software to the assay in between. The answer comes as written work, as hands on time with your team, or as training so they can do it themselves. I have taken a platform of this kind from the first experiment to a product that customers run without me.

  1. 01

    Technology assessment

    It works in a paper. Will it work as an instrument someone can buy, run and service?

  2. 02

    Positioning and commercial roadmap

    What is this for, who pays for it, and what makes it hard to copy?

  3. 03

    Product definition

    We have a platform. What is the product, and what has to be true before we commit?

  4. 04

    Programme execution

    We know what to build. How does it actually get made, in what order, and by whom?

  5. 05

    Platform performance

    It works in our hands. Why does it not work in theirs?

Behind it

Xin Liu

Xin Liu, PhD
Founder and Consultant

I have spent fifteen years building life science platform businesses, in leadership roles spanning technology, product, commercial and customer engagement. At Sphere Fluidics, a University of Cambridge spin-out, I helped take a single cell analysis platform from early research through productisation and commercial launch to adoption by customers in biotherapeutics discovery. I am also a co-inventor of the technology behind it.

I understand the life science tools industry from the inside: how platforms are specified, funded, built, sold and supported, and what makes customers adopt them. I work with founders and leadership teams on the decisions that shape a platform business, and stay with them through delivery.

Where to find me