COVID-19 and Sophion

COVID-19 Update

The escalating outbreak of COVID-19 has affected each one of us in multiple ways, our families, friends, businesses and way of life. This fast-changing situation has forced us, to re-evaluate how we operate at Sophion Bioscience and adapt to the new situation.

We are actively working on using this challenge as an opportunity to make our company more dedicated, more efficient, and more focused on supporting the needs of our users, and an even better company to partner with in the future.

Putting safety first

Our priority is the safety of our staff, our users and our suppliers we frequently interact with. To limit exposure, we have limited international travel and asked our staff to work remotely when possible. We have a good IT infrastructure, and a well-proportioned bandwidth and VPN capacity that allows us to work remotely on even our very large patch-clamp data sets. Also, we have increased our online meeting activities, internally and with customers around the world, so to date, this transition has gone smoothly.

Maintaining production, service and support

Sophion Bioscience laboratories in Copenhagen, Boston, and Tokyo are still operational. However, we have scheduled laboratory hours, so not everyone is at work at the same time to reduce the risk of infection. While laboratory work is key to support our users in assay and application development, reporting and support can easily be done from home offices.

Field Service support is still running; however, scheduled maintenance visits might be postponed and in general, we try to avoid travelling unless for critical repairs. Support is, when possible, done by remote assistance using either TeamViewer access, video calls or regular phone calls. We will, of course, comply with national restrictions, so there are regions where we cannot currently visit.

Production and assembly lines are working, but again, to reduce the risk of infection we are working two shifts. A morning shift and an evening shift.

Minimizing disruption

In the last months, we have seen that many of our users have been de-densifying or closing laboratories. While some users are beginning to scale up again, other users are just beginning the close-down.

We are doing everything in our power to ensure science and innovation do not stop. We still have day-to-day delivery on QPlates and QChips and are planning to ensure deliveries. Production of QPlates and QChips continues uninterrupted, as well as the production of QPatch IIs and Qube 384s.

A few of our users have postponed the install of new systems because of travel restrictions. We will be ready when the world opens up again.

Looking ahead

In these most unusual circumstances, Sophion is renewing our commitment to becoming a better partner to you at the service of the greater cause we all work for, to ‘develop better and safer drugs, faster’. We will continue to be here to help you accomplish this objective during and after this crisis is over.

Please do not hesitate to call on us for any reason. We wish you and everyone around you the best of health and look forward to meeting and engaging with you and your teams in-person soon.

We are positive that we will all come out of this as with a stronger team, a fitter company and hopefully also a more caring world.