This was a fantastic read this weekend. Both the technology and the fact it is a cool story overall!
I should, however, start with - no, you can't buy one yet. This is some advanced prototype of what was a student project a few years ago. You can read and watch a video about the Isolatrix here.
If it was for sale right this second, I wouldn't jump in line to buy it. The reason it is so amazingly super fast is that it makes a decent number of mistakes, but it's smart enough to identify those wells with zero cells or more than 1 cell, or one funny cell itself. While this sounds simple to fix, it's easier for us to run every "single cell" well rather than skip the ones that are funny. That works when we're getting >85% single cells in our current workflow, but I currently wouldn't trade 100x faster for a whole lot more errors till some other issues were sorted out.
Now, when they do compare it to our current single cell isolation solution in our lab - Isolatrix preps in lower volumes and a ton faster AND gets visual data, so it's neither close nor really fair. Higher coverage per cell and the ability to go back and evaluate the cells that you were working with visually? That's a lot. Now...my solution was $25k when I bought it ($42k list now) and the chips were like $12 a piece (about $50 each now) and so we expect better newer tech to crush it in head-to-head analyses.
If you are a mass spec nerd and want to see what a TIMSTOF SCP vs Ultra2 look like on the same cells. This is another good comparison of the early and newer hardware.
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