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Thomas Meany
OpenCell.bio/jobs HIRING!
Thomas Meany is the proud founder of opencell.bio, a company focused on building biotech labs in shipping containers in White City, London. The company was established in 2018 with the mission of enhancing the accessibility and affordability of biotechnology.
At opencell.bio, Thomas and his team integrate robotic automation and IoT technology into laboratories with an opensource development approach. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has shifted its focus towards expanding daily COVID testing capacity through their BSL2+ facility, CONTAIN, which is designed for high throughput workflows.
Thomas Meany is a highly educated individual with a PhD in Physics, optics, and integrated devices from Macquarie University, along with a B.Sc. (1st Class) in Applied Physics and Electronics from the University of Galway.
Throughout his career, Thomas has held various roles in prestigious organizations such as being a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Director at OpenCell, CEO at Cell-Free Technology Ltd., Consultancy Manager at EPOC, Interdisciplinary Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Media Relations Manager at CUTEC, Visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, Research Scientist & Marie Curie Fellow at Toshiba Research Europe Limited, Course Tutor at Macquarie University, PhD student in Physics and Engineering at Macquarie University, and Assistant Engineer (Intern) at Ecole Polytechnique.
Highlights
Sharing a 🧵 about our latest publication https://lnkd.in/d9gansnY Click the dots👇
Our shipping container laboratory is based at the airport on the Isle of Jersey and screened all incoming passengers. We show in this paper that by integrating a mobile PCR lab with DNA sequencing tech from Oxford Nanopore Technologies we can deliver a swab-to-sequence result in under 30 hours. This compares with weeks currently available by shipping samples to centralised labs.
This can help create near real-time public health data available to patients and policy makers. Potentially offering a path to highly localised outbreak managment with sequence specific lockdowns, for example.
This work is the result of hundreds of thousands of COVID PCR tests and our focus on DECENTRALISED screening. We have a strong belief that this is the right approach for the future of healthcare.
We believe that mobile diagnostics is key to delivering quick turnarounds. People are fundamentally distributed and the logistics of shipping samples to centralised labs is hard. This is one solution.
This work is the result of some amazing people, in particular Sara Farahi, Cynthia Mpofu, Helene Steiner and Anthony Thomas from the OpenCell team.
We also offer a huge thanks to Stanhope PLC who were extremely supportive in accommodating our labs for a year on their lovely grassland!
