“Aside from its cartridge, pipette, and temperature issues, many of the other technical snafus that plagued the miniLab could be chalked up to the fact that it remained at a very early prototype stage. Less than three years was not a lot of time to design and perfect a complex medical device. These problems ranged from the robots’ arms landing in the wrong places, causing pipettes to break, to the spectrophotometers being badly misaligned. At one point, the blood-spinning centrifuge in one of the miniLabs blew up. These were all things that could be fixed, but it would take time. The company was still several years away from having a viable product that could be used on patients.”