Company > About Us

Bringing Scientists and
Laboratory Automation Together

HighRes® Biosolutions is the leading global laboratory automation company, empowering scientists to create results by connecting instrumentation, software and data – from anywhere in the world. Our partners achieve unprecedented levels of productivity while continually adapting to dynamic scientific, technological, and organizational structures.

Our team is:

Innovative

We create and inspire to delight customers.

Collaborative

We contribute graciously and gratefully.

Adaptable

We learn and teach as agents of change.

Responsible

We work with honesty and pride.

Exceptional

We do the difficult things with a focus on success.

HighRes Biosolutions is focused on quality. We are guided by ISO industrial manufacturing and laboratory quality standards, and are committed to robust product design, rigorous process control, and continuous quality improvement.

Our Story

HighRes® Biosolutions, originally founded in 2004 as High Resolution Engineering, was born of colleagues sharing their ideas at a life science conference. The result was the MicroDock™, a device that allowed carts carrying laboratory instruments to be configured to meet the needs of scientific workflows, docked to robotic arms, and then reconfigured and redocked on-the-fly as workflow requirements changed. Advances in human health were accelerated with modular automation that could change with the changing nature of science.

An initial team of just a handful of people pioneered the first modular automated Work Cells that could be modified in under 30 seconds, automatically (re)connecting power, data, and gases without the need to reteach the robotic arm to any device position – a groundbreaking approach to laboratory automation that enabled collaboration and increased democratization, particularly with the use of expensive and rate-limiting analytical devices. HighRes Biosolutions installed their first automated systems in 2005 to support basic pharmaceutical research, and these systems are still in service today. We continue to engineer design-forward components, including Nucleus®, our next generation of automation hardware.

At the same time, HighRes developed Cellario™ software to seamlessly integrate with all the individual devices and software within a laboratory, regardless of vendor or format. This was groundbreaking work as well, because error recovery and protocol modification could be performed on-the-fly while ensuring that samples were treated uniformly, and critical timings were maintained. Today, Cellario intuitively connects operators with their instrumentation and informatics, moving them beyond workflow scheduling and process management to the creation of data factories that produce data more quickly and reliably for better decisions faster.

In 2015, HighRes Biosolutions was added to the Axel Johnson, Inc. portfolio of industry-leading companies. Since then, we have grown to be a global presence with over 220 employees worldwide. Our North American office is located about 25 miles north of downtown Boston, in Beverly, Massachusetts, and houses our offices, assembly area, machine and electronics shops, and a showroom for client demonstrations. Our European office is in Manchester, United Kingdom, and it offers full applications and service support by region. Our application portfolio now extends to every aspect of the life sciences.

As we look ahead, the future at HighRes Biosolutions is very bright. We continue to work with our clients to refine the Design, Make, Test, and Analyze (DMTA) cycle of laboratory automation to better realize cost and time savings and to transform the digital landscape so that Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data are maximized to drive scientific discovery.

Our Technology

As a scientific workflow enablement company with decades of experience automating laboratory workflows across the life sciences, HighRes® Biosolutions increases workflow repeatability and reproducibility, efficiency, and productivity for our client partners. Our primary products are Cellario™ and Nucleus®. Cellario software integrates all the devices and software within a laboratory, regardless of vendor or format, allowing labs to select and implement the best possible technologies to execute their work. Nucleus® hardware brings standardization to the physical space of any laboratory while improving modular capabilities, allowing all devices to adapt to changing workflows while providing a familiar environment for both the operator and the robot to work collaboratively. Cellario and Nucleus® work in concert to fully integrate experimental design, planning, and workflow execution across laboratories and entire organizations wherever in the world they may be.

Our Clients

We enable the scientific discoveries of leading laboratories across the globe, such as these:

Our Leadership Team

Ira Hoffman

Chief Executive Officer

Sandy Grindley

Chief Financial Officer

Brian O'Sullivan

Senior Vice President of Commercial

Vladimir Zhirnov

Vice President of Multiple Engineering Disciplines

Jack Dawson

Vice President of European Operations

Wendy Arnold

Vice President of Human Resources

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