Beacon Select, best suited for small- to mid-sized biopharmaceutical companies, clinical research organizations (CROs), and contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs), is intended to enable scientists to clone, culture, assay, and select top clones in a single run on a single platform.

The Beacon Select's optofluidic and NanoPen chamber technology and proprietary CLD applications are designed to meet new market segment customers' research and budgetary needs. The company contends that the system's high throughput cloning, screening, and selection of top-performing Chinese hamster ovary cell lines may help reduce overall bioprocessing costs, improve success probability, and shorten timelines.

Berkeley Lights will offer Beacon Select with various purchase options, including capital placement, lease, or reagent rental. The two-chip Beacon Select list price is approximately half the current four-chip Beacon system launched in 2017, which is geared for high-campaign usage from large biopharmaceutical and established CDMOs and CROs; it currently has approximately 130 systems installed globally.

"By the second half of 2023, we will also offer Beacon Quest, an optofluidic system specialized for academic research institutes and translational research centers," said Berkeley Lights CEO Siddhartha Kadia, PhD, in a statement.