Rapid deployment of inexpensive open-source orbital shakers in support of high-throughput screening

Open-source projects continue to grow in popularity alongside open-source educational resources, software, and hardware tools. The impact of this increased availability of open-source technologies is that end users are empowered to have greater control over the tools that they work with. This trend extends in the life science laboratory space, where new open-source projects are routinely being published that allow users to build and modify scientific equipment specifically tailored to their needs, often at a reduced cost from equivalent commercial offerings. Recently, we identified a need for a compact orbital shaker that would be usable in temperature and humidity-controlled incubators to support the development and execution of a high-throughput suspension cell-based assay. Based on the requirements provided by staff biologists, an open-source project known as the DIYbio orbital shaker was identified on Thingiverse, then quickly prototyped and tested. The initial orbital shaker prototype based on the DIYbio design underwent an iterative prototyping and design process that proved to be straightforward due to the open-source nature of the project. The result of these efforts has been the successful initial deployment of ten shakers as of August 2021. This afforded us the scalability and efficacy needed to complete a large-scale screening campaign in less time and at less cost than if we purchased larger, less adaptable orbital shakers. Lessons learned from prototyping, modifying, validating, deploying and maintaining laboratory devices based on an open-source design in support of a full-scale drug discovery high-throughput screening effort are described within this manuscript.