Abstract
Jouan's robotics adventure began in 2000 with the acquisition of Gira, a small company located in South West of France. Gira's main activity was the manufacture of customized electronic cards and robotic platforms. A key product under development was the Molbank™. After the acquisition needed to allow the company to achieve a significant growth, Jouan allocated marketing resources to develop and promote the Molbank™. The system is now the cornerstone of the Jouan Robotics Division, created January 2002, directed by D. Blanchard. The division has its own marketing department that involves life science application experts and specialist product managers for storage modules, robotized centrifuges, and automated incubators, and has dotted line responsibility for other Robotics cells business units housed by Jouan Group's subsidiaries.
JOUAN'S STRENGTH AND INTERNATIONAL PRESENCE
Jouan Robotics piggybacks on the support and international reputation of its parent company. The Jouan group is well established in the market for standard bioinstruments and offers equipment such as: deep freezers, centrifuges, CO2 incubators, and laminar air flow cabinets. The Robotics Division uses the Jouan Group's international organization to sell its products. Each local Jouan subsidiary houses a Jouan Robotics business unit responsible for direct sales and support for robotics products. Robotics business activities consist of sales, engineering support and after sales service to support the growing installed base of Jouan Robotics instruments.
Jouan has long been established in the USA with its subsidiary Jouan Inc. Group subsidiaries cover the globe. Jouan, Inc., was formed in 1983 to distribute Jouan products in Canada and the US. This subsidiary has grown and expanded significantly over the past 20 years. Today, Jouan, Inc. accounts for over one-third of the total group revenue, and has a fully integrated manu facturing plant built in 1997, along with sales, service and design support activities.
European customers are served by the Robotics cells located in Jouan Ltd. in the (UK), Jouan S.A. in (FranceFrance), Jouan GmbH (in Germany) and Switzerland, Jouan Nordic in (Denmark), Sweden, and Norway, Jouan Italyin Italy and Jouan Nederlands. in The Netherlands, Belgium: The rest of Europe is
In Asia, Jouan SA covers Japan and China.
Jouan's products are found throughout the biotechnology and life science research continuum. For the pharmaceutical and biotech industries the Jouan Group products address: combinatorial chemistry, library management, product screening with cells-based assays, genomics, pharmacogenomics and the production of antibodies. In research labs located in academia, hospital research institutes and hospitals the products aid in genomics, cancer research, stem cell therapy, pharmacogenomics and sample biorepositories. Clinical reference and hospital labs use Jouan Group products for pre-analytical sample preparation and sample storage and management.
Part of the Jouan Group's success lies in its commitment to its customers and after sales service that is a central point of the Jouan strategy. In order to provide customers with the best training programs and permanent technical assistance, additional resources involving highly trained technicians have been allocated for Robotics products.
Jouan Group commits 5%-6% of sales revenue — Euro 96 million ($96 million) in 2001 — to R&D, 50% of this a significant part has been assigned to Jouan Robotics. The Jouan Group employs some 80 engineers in its R&D departments. Three centers in France are responsible for freezers, incubators, and robotics, the center in Italy — centrifuges and motors, the center in Denmark — laminar air flow cabinets, freeze dryers, centrifugal evaporators, baths and the US center — product adaptation.
GROWTH POTENTIAL
Jouan Group has dedicated significant resources to support these varied markets with products that help scientists automate all of these essential lab and research functions. The company's core strengths in cold storage and management of biological samples, centrifugation, incubation (cell culture) have done well. Jouan Robotics builds on these strengths. Jouan anticipates its greatest growth will come from products that offer, as examples, automated storage, and automated incubation due to the growing trend to automated cell-based assays and the production of stem cells. Additional growth will be realized in automated centrifuges for pre-clinical sample preparation and molecular test sample handling and processing applications.
MANUFACTURING SELF-SUFFICIENCY, A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Jouan Group strives to provide appropriately priced products. This strategy is made possible by careful cost control and the industrial manufacturing strength of the Jouan Group. Almost all of the basic component parts are manufactured in Jouan plants. This allows Jouan the ability to produce these parts according to company specifications and thus control the quality of all parts used in Jouan instrumentation. Jouan believes that its control of product manufacturing allows the company to design and manufacture parts competitively. Jouan designs and manufactures its own centrifuge motors. Most recently, Jouan has introduced a totally new drive for the automated centrifuge that is perfectly suited to both high-speed spinning and precise positioning with an optical encoder. This same attention to detail and product performance has been used in the development of products for Jouan Robotics.
All Jouan Robotics products interface with automated systems. The main differentiation factors from the competition lie in Jouan's experience in the market and attention to product design and precise manufacturing.
Jouan Robotics products build on Jouan's expertise and experience in the automation of lab equipment. For example, the MolBank™ has the best capacity to floor space ratio thanks to carefully optimized internal robotics. The centrifuge, with its unique bucket-lifting feature, makes integration much easier than with other centrifuges.
Seven manufacturing facilities provide Jouan Group its manufacturing self-sufficiency. A general plant located in Château Gontier, France, produces sheet metal and electronic boards, and assembles centrifuges, incubators, and laminar air flow cabinets. A second general plant in Winchester, VA produces sheet metal and assembles centrifuges, incubators, and laminar air flow cabinets.
Jouan also maintains five plants for more specialized manufacturing, of which the one in Pau were are assembled the robotics products. A plant in Saint-Nazaire, France is responsible for machining; in Pau, France — electronic boards and robotics integration; in Milan, Italy — centrifuge motors; in Mukarov, Czech Republic — freezers and in Allerd, Denmark — freeze dryers and baths.
THE MOLBANK™
Jouan Robotics premier product offering is the Molbank™ storage system. There is exponential growth in the number of compounds synthesized by combinatorial chemistry, screened through HTS assays, and samples produced by genomic research. As the number of compounds continues to increase, research laboratories face the problem of accurate sample storage and retrieval. Drug discovery laboratories use the MolBank™ to manage their libraries of new pharmaceutical compounds. Genomics labs store libraries of human genomic samples and oligonucleotides. The instrument can be integrated in small systems involving mainly a liquid handler with plate handling capabilities, as well as in larger systems where multiple units are integrated with track robots (up to 6 have been installed in the same system).
The Molbank™ is designed for the automated loading and retrieval of deep well plates, microplates and racks of microtubes. Further it allows for the storage of these samples under highly controlled environmental conditions that ensure their long-term quality and stability of the samples. Molbank™'s temperature can be set at from −200C to +200C, with optional precise humidity and oxygen control. Bar-code reading facilitates the tracking of all storage and retrieval operations. With a capacity of more than 2500 plates, the MolBank™ has the largest single instrument capacity on the market.
Functionally, the MolBank™ is comprised of a double storage carrousel, a gripper able to store and retrieve plates from these carrousels, all included in a perfectly insulated enclosure. This enclosure is kept cold at the set temperature and the Molbank™ exchanges plates with its environment through a specific trap which minimizes heat and moisture exchanges with the surrounding atmosphere.
Each MolBank™ is delivered with an ActiveX driver for easy control using third party software. In addition, a new MolBank Supervisor Software allows easy control of single or multiple MolBank™ systems, through a graphical user interface based on storage and retrieval worklists. Information on all samples is gathered in a database common to all MolBank™ systems. For seamless integration in platforms, this supervisor can also be controlled in slave mode from a master control software based on ATL/DCOM technology.
Selected Molbank™ specifications include:
Storage capacity: 2571 microplates, 1561 deep-well plates 0.5 ml, 1014 deep-well plates 2 mL.
Temperature control: −200C to 200C (stability +/− 20C)
Atmosphere control: Nitrogen and moisture control, optional
Operating conditions: Ambient temperature 50C to 300C
Relative humidity: up to 70% at 300C
Access time: 21 to 33 seconds with barcode reading
Interfaces: RS 232, Lonworks network
GR4 AUTOMATED CENTRIFUGE
The GR4 Auto is a fully automated centrifuge, with the following automated functions: automated lid opening, automated rotor indexing, and automated lifting of the bucket above the lid for easy handling of tubes and plates by an external robot. The GR4 offers several unique features. It can interface with a standard, simple low cost sample handling robot. Thus customers can use any robot they may already have on hand.
Optional automated bucket cover removal is another feature unique to the GR4. This is specially important in maximizing biosafety when centrifuging blood tubes using bucket covers.
The centrifuge is available with various rotating equipment configurations for plates, tubes, or racks of tubes. Its maximum capacity is:
up to 12 shallow-well (or 4 deep-well) plates,
up to 96 vacutainers, or
up to 8 racks of 5 tubes (Stago/Hitachi type racks).
Specifications:
Rotor speed/G force: 3500 rpm/2500 g max (adjustable, 100 rpm steps)
Temperature: 0° to 40° (for 20° ambient)
Interfaces: RS 232, RS 485
Dimensions: 555 mm Width, 630 mm Depth, 907 mm Height
Weight: 150 Kg
Max Noise: 65 dBA
THE FUTURE
Jouan Robotics was established to respond to market demand for automated instruments with fully automated sample handling and parameter control so as to allow their integration in robotic laboratory workstations and platforms.
Using the R&D, sales and after sales service of the Jouan Group, the Robotics Division is expected to see significant important growth. and to have revenues of Euro 50 million ($49 million) by 2005 Thus the company anticipates that Jouan Robotics products will represent 30a significant portion of the total sales of the Jouan Group by 2005. To achieve this goal, human resources will be allocated accordingly and a new manufacturing plant is planned.
At a time when the standard laboratory instrumentation market experiences a modest growth rate of 3 to 5 % per annum, Jouan group views the Robotics Division as a strategic development which will feed its growth of revenues and profits in the coming years.