Following are images from my time at Sequana Therapeutics/Axys Pharmaceuticals.

Sequana was acquired by (officially merged with) Arris Pharmaceuticals of South San Francisco in 1997, and they both became Axys Pharmaceuticals. The Sequana (Axys South) facility was closed and all of the remaining personnel were laid off 10/1/1999. The remaining parts of Axys were purchased by Celera in November 2001 to become Celera Therapeutics. The Sequana (Axys South) facility had 8 Packard MultiPROBE (TM) I robots, 3 Biomek (R) 2000s, the first shipped PBA Technologies (later acquired by Genomic Solutions) Flexys (TM) robot, 2 Robbins Scientific Hydra (TM) 96s, 2 Hamilton Microlab 2200 robots, and three in-house integrated systems comprised of track mounted CRS A255s and Sagian Multipette (now Beckman Coulter Multimek 96) robots. At the height of Sequana's operations, many of these systems were in operation 10-14 hours per day, every day of the week, helping the company achieve a run rate of 2 million microsatellite marker genotypes per year. The goals of the engineering group at Sequana/Axys South were to improve efficiency, to reduce the risk of repetitive motion injuries and dangers caused by worker exposure to processes, to support all existing equipment, and to investigate new technologies that may be of use to further the goals of the company. Many of our custom projects were presented at national or international meetings associated with laboratory automation or automated sequencing of DNA.

This image is of the main menu of the Production Robot Operating System, a custom user interface I created for the Packard MultiPROBE(TM) I robots for setting up PCRs and standard aliquots, completed in 1995. Packard was very helpful with providing me lower level functionality in order to create my own user interface.

The left image shows one of the three MultiPROBEs that these processes were created to run on in the midst of a PCR set-up. The right image shows some of the over 100 thermal cyclers that were in the Genotyping lab. Much of this work was presented in October 1996, and January 1997. Links to the abstracts can be found on the Resume page.

For more Sequana/Axys images click HERE

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Updated 7/9/2019 by Douglas Gurevitch