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Train your model on biology, not on your sample prep.

Label-free, scripted prep for million-cell datasets, on the robot you already run.

96samples in parallel on one SBS-format array
>95%viability going into sequencing, cytometry or screening
3hands-on steps; the rest runs on the robot
$10per sampleso million-cell studies fit the budget

Virtual cell models, perturbation atlases and foundation-scale datasets are built from thousands of samples over months: cell lines after transfection or editing, PBMCs and dissociated tissue out of the freezer, iPSC-derived cells after differentiation, organoids after dissociation. Every one arrives with dead cells and debris, and if every one is cleaned up by hand, the dataset carries biases from the operator, the day and the centrifuge. The LeviCell 96 System replaces spins, filters, beads and labels with a gentle magnetic density field, scripted on your liquid handler, so every well gets the same treatment and leaves a QC record behind.

Book a liquid handler reviewSee the evidenceDownload the one-pager (PDF)

One SALT array: 96 wells, 15,000 to 500,000 cells each, 5 minutes hands-on, 45 minutes from loading to enriched cells.

Sample prep is where batch effects are born.

Downstream software can regress out a batch effect it can measure. It cannot recover a sample that was never viable, and it cannot see the variability that manual prep adds before the first barcode.

Operator and day

Spins, strainers and bead kits are hands-on steps with hands-on variance. Across a hundred-million-cell program, that variance is a feature the model will learn.

Damaged cells, from every workflow

Thaw, electroporation, lipofection, CRISPR editing, drug treatment and dissociation all leave dead and dying cells behind. Their RNA becomes ambient background in every barcode; their fragments become doublets and debris.

No record

Most prep steps leave no record. When a cluster looks odd eighteen months later, nobody can say what the input looked like that day.

Every workflow that relies on cells needs the same step.

Levitation separates cells by their physical properties, so it does not care how the damage happened. It belongs wherever cells have just been thawed, transfected, edited, treated or dissociated, and right before they are fixed, barcoded or loaded.

Cryopreserved PBMCs and dissociated tissue

Half the cells can be dead at thaw, and the debris is in the tube with them. Enrich live cells at thaw instead of waiting for a recovery culture that adds time and variance.

Measured on cryopreserved tumor DTCs: viability 52% → 75%; sequencing-ready samples from 1 in 16 → 10 in 16.

Cell lines after transfection or electroporation

Electroporation and lipofection kill a large share of cells in the first days, and the dying cells and fragments are still there when you harvest. Remove them label-free, right before fixation or barcoding, with no spins on fragile cells.

Timing: enrich at harvest, not after a recovery step that selects for the fittest clones.

CRISPR and Perturb-seq screens

Dead cells and debris inflate ambient RNA and doublets, and both corrupt guide assignment and perturbation calls. Clean input makes the perturbation the only variable that changed.

Measured: 21% less ambient RNA and six-fold fewer doublets after one run, lower in every cell population.

Drug perturbation and dose response

Cytotoxic conditions produce apoptotic fractions by design. Enrich the surviving cells so their transcriptomes describe the response, or collect defined fractions when death is the readout.

Label-free, so no antibody or dye biases which cells are kept.

iPSC-derived cells and organoids

Differentiated cells and dissociated organoids are fragile and carry dissociation debris. A passive magnetic field, with no shear, centrifugation or filtering, keeps them intact and their transient states unchanged.

Cells, nuclei, organoids and spheroids; fresh, thawed or fixed.

Nuclei from frozen tissue

Nuclei preps carry cytoplasmic debris and clumps that read as background in every barcode. Clean up the nuclei suspension on the same array: debris and aggregates removed, nuclei collected ready to load.

Label-free clean-up of nuclei preps; no spins, no filters.

The study figures above are from cryopreserved dissociated tumor cells, the hardest common input. The separation is physical and label-free, so the same step applies to any suspension; the 96-sample standardization run measures it on your cell type.

Five minutes on the most manual step in the lab.

Where batch effects come from, why software can't fix them after the fact, and what a scripted, label-free prep step does about it. Eight slides; they advance on their own, or tap through.

Single-cell data at scale

Where do batch effects actually come from?

The most manual step in the lab1 / 8

The steps nobody logs

Thaw. Spin. Strain. Bead kit. Repeat for 2,000 samples.

Every one of these is a hands-on step with hands-on variance. Across a hundred-million-cell program, that variance is in the training set, and the model will learn it as biology.

Operator, day, centrifuge: none of it is in the metadata2 / 8

Dead cells and debris become noise

Thaw, transfection, editing, dissociation: they all leave dead cells behind.

Their RNA leaks into every cell's barcode as ambient RNA. Their fragments become doublets and debris. In the Discovery Life Sciences study, the most contaminated tumor sample spent 68% of its reads on soup, not cells.

Cell lines, PBMCs, DTCs, iPSC-derived cells, organoids, nuclei3 / 8

The limit of software

You can regress out a batch effect you can measure.

You cannot recover a sample that was never viable, and you cannot see the variance that entered before the first barcode. The fix has to be physical, and it has to be the same every time.

Downstream correction starts after the damage is done4 / 8

Identical, scripted, on the robot

96 samples. One array. Every step scripted.

1Enrich: live cells levitate, dead cells and debris sink
2Wash: buffer exchange in the well, no spins
3Collect, pool, concentrate: ready to load in 45 minutes
4Repeat, identically, plate after plate
LeviCell 96 System, SLAS/SBS footprint, standard liquid handling5 / 8

A record for every plate

Same script, every well, logged.

A scripted protocol does the same thing to every well and leaves a run log behind. Pair it with viability counts before and after, and every sample in the dataset comes with a record of how it was prepared, and an answer when a cluster looks odd eighteen months later.

A prep record is part of the dataset6 / 8

What it did on 16 real samples

1 → 10of 16 sequencing-ready at a hard 70% viability cutoff
52% → 75%median viability after one 40-minute run
6×fewer high-confidence doublets; 21% less ambient RNA
85/100marker genes carry over: same biology, cleaner input
Study by Discovery Life Sciences; Parse Evercode WT assay7 / 8

Train your model on biology, not on your sample prep.

Building a perturbation atlas, a virtual cell training set or a screening program in the thousands of samples? We'll map the LeviCell 96 onto your robot. One page back, fifteen minutes, free.

Book a liquid handler review

levitasbio.com/data-at-scale8 / 8
Advances every 4 seconds; pauses while you hover. Arrow keys work too.
Download the slides (PDF)Download the one-pager (PDF)

Every prep step, scripted, on the robot.

The LeviCell 96 System brings the steps that usually happen on separate benches into one label-free, centrifuge-free workflow on standard SBS-compatible liquid handling.

1Enrich

Live cells levitate into one band; dead cells and debris sink. No labels, beads or shear.

2Wash

Buffer exchanges in the well, with no centrifuge spins.

3Collect, pool, concentrate

Pick the fraction of interest, combine wells to fit the study design, elute in small volumes ready for loading.

Reproducible by design

Identical, scripted processing in every well removes operator-to-operator and day-to-day variability before it reaches the data.

Clean, unbiased inputs

Label-free separation preserves native biology and removes dead cells and debris, the two largest sources of ambient RNA and doublets.

A record for every plate

A scripted protocol does the same thing to every well and leaves a run log behind. Add viability counts before and after, as in the Discovery study, and every sample's prep is on record.

Cells, nuclei, organoids and spheroids, and particles. Fresh, thawed and fixed-cell workflows. Same chemistry from the LeviCell 12 to the LeviCell 96, so methods developed at small scale transfer without re-optimizing. The LeviCell 96 System ships with the INTEGRA liquid handler; the SALT array uses the SLAS/SBS 96-well footprint.

What standardized prep did to the hardest input.

Discovery Life Sciences ran 16 cryopreserved dissociated tumor samples, the input most likely to arrive half dead, through one levitation step, then sequenced ten of them with the Parse Evercode WT assay, untouched and levitated.

110of 16

Samples ready to sequence at a hard 70% viability cutoff.

Median viability 52% to 75%; 89% of dead cells removed from a typical sample; 21% less ambient RNA and six times fewer doublets in the paired libraries; 85 of 100 marker genes carried over, so the biology came through unchanged. Ten times the datasets from the same tissue.

Full results, charts and cost model

Study conducted by Discovery Life SciencesEvercode WT assay by Parse Biosciences

"We successfully integrated LevitasBio's Levitation Technology into our workflows for a variety of single cell approaches. Experiments with very sensitive cell types, or samples that are not suitable for cell sorting, benefit from this gentle, fast method to exclude dead cells and debris."

Stefan Günther, PhDHead of Next Gen Sequencing Facility, Max Planck Institute

"The LeviCell EOS system allows our lab to process several low-viability samples simultaneously into high-viability samples, which is absolutely critical for single cell sequencing analyses."

Greg Golden, PhDPostdoctoral Researcher, University of Pennsylvania

What we don't claim

The Discovery study is 16 samples at bench scale and 10 at sequencing scale, with a confirmatory same-run study in progress. Batch-effect reduction across a multi-month program is the expected consequence of identical, scripted processing; it is what the 96-sample standardization run below is designed to measure on your samples, not something we ask you to take on faith.

Three ways to start, none of them a leap.

Pick the rung that matches where your program is. Each one produces something you can put in front of your team.

Rung 1, 15 minutes

Liquid handler review

Tell us your liquid handler, sample types and throughput target. We send back a one-page map of the SALT array on your robot, with timing per plate and the protocols that apply. Free, no instrument required.

Request a liquid handler review
Rung 2, two weeks

96-sample standardization run

Send 96 samples to us, or run them at a partner service lab. You get viability and debris counts for every sample before and after, as in the Discovery study, and a side-by-side against your current prep on the same material.

Plan a run
Rung 3, scale path

Develop on 12, scale to 96

Develop methods on a LeviCell 12, then move to the LeviCell 96 System without re-optimizing. Flexible purchase options, so scaling up is a schedule decision, not a budget cliff.

Talk to an automation specialist

What a million usable cells costs, with and without.

An illustrative model you can run on your own numbers. It uses this study's viability gain and your costs; replace any input with your own quotes.

Viability after levitation is taken as your starting viability plus the study's median per-sample gain of 24 points (measured on cryopreserved tumor cells), capped at 95%. Usable cells per sample = cells loaded × viability. Clean-up cost means the viability clean-up step only: dead-cell removal kit or sort reagents, strainers, consumables and the hands-on labor for that step; for LeviCell it is the consumable. Costs that are the same in both arms (thaw, culture, counting) are left out; add them to the downstream figure if you want full totals. Failed-run costs are not included, so the comparison is conservative.

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To reach the targetCurrent clean-upWith LeviCell 96
Samples to prep and sequence00
Usable cells per sample00
Clean-up cost$0$0
Downstream cost$0$0
Total$0$0
Cost per usable cell$0$0

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Get in touch.

Book a liquid handler review, plan a 96-sample run, get your cost model or just ask a question. One short form goes straight to the LevitasBio sales team.

Only your name, email and organization are required. Details about your robot and samples help us come back with something specific.

Prefer email? Write to sales@levitasbio.com.

Sharing this with your team? Download the one-pager (PDF).

Standardize the step your model can't unlearn.

If you're building a perturbation atlas, a virtual cell training set or a screening program that runs into the thousands of samples, we'd like to map LeviCell 96 onto your robot. It takes fifteen minutes and costs nothing.

Book a liquid handler reviewContact usGet product updatesDownload the one-pager (PDF)levitasbio.com/automation