“Our goal is to start in Cyprus as a testbed, expand to Europe and then go international,” Dr Dimitris Kyriakou, Founder and CEO of Efevre Tech LTD, tells CBN and InBusinessNews in an interview.
The company was founded in 2018 to address the reproducibility crisis affecting the international scientific community, leveraging advanced automation technologies. Efevre Tech LTD is a Cypriot company specialising in the development of innovative laboratory automation solutions for the life sciences sector.
With a focus on continuous research and innovation, the company consistently invests in new technologies, such as the advanced AMGEL Pro 24/7 Robotic Model.
“I experienced firsthand what the literature calls the reproducibility crisis: around 70% of published data in the life sciences cannot be reproduced by other researchers.”
How did the idea for EFEVRE TECH come about, and what problem in the scientific community were you trying to solve?
The idea emerged directly from the research bench during my studies as a biology researcher. With a background in molecular biology, I experienced firsthand what the literature calls the reproducibility crisis: around 70% of published data in the life sciences cannot be reproduced by other researchers. This is not an academic detail. It delays drug development, wastes resources and undermines trust in science.
When I analysed the problem, I saw it had three roots. First, execution: the human hand introduces variability into every pipetting step and every incubation. Second, documentation: researchers publish what they remember, not what they actually did. Third, interpretation: even with good data, reading it passes through biases and selective literature. EFEVRE TECH was founded to address all three levels, each with its own tool.
Which industries or organisations can benefit most from the robotic automation systems you develop?
Anyone performing repetitive laboratory work at scale. In practice: academic life sciences labs, R&D departments of pharmaceutical and biotech companies, molecular and genetic diagnostics labs, forensic labs, as well as food and agriculture quality control labs.
Their common characteristic is that they spend highly specialised staff on manual, standardised work. That is where automation delivers the greatest value: not only in speed, but above all in consistency and reproducibility.
What exactly is AMGEL (AutoMated GEneral Laboratory), and how does it change the way a modern lab operates?
AMGEL is a flexible robotic workstation that automates core wet-lab processes in a single device: pipetting, centrifugation, heating and cooling, magnetic bead isolation, cold storage, PCR and more. Unlike competing systems designed for a single application, AMGEL covers the full range of daily bench work, with over 860 pre-installed protocols and unlimited user-defined protocols.
It changes lab operations in two ways. First, it runs autonomously 24/7 without supervision, thanks to an integrated scheduler and an automatic carousel fridge. So the researcher designs the experiment and the machine runs it overnight. Second, every step is performed in exactly the same way every time, eliminating the variability introduced by the human hand. The result is higher throughput, fewer errors and data that can truly be reproduced.
“The gap between a prototype that works in the lab and a product that operates reliably in a customer’s hands is huge.”
How difficult was it to turn a research idea born at university into a commercial product with international prospects?
Difficult, and it would be misleading to present it otherwise. The gap between a prototype that works in the lab and a product that operates reliably in a customer’s hands is huge. It requires engineering robustness, field reliability, software that someone can use without knowing how to code, and capital to get there.
The key lesson was that this cannot be done by one discipline alone. We had to bring together biologists, engineers and programmers, people who speak different languages but are solving the same problem. The transition from idea to market was not a single leap; it was years of iterations, with each cycle fixing something we had not anticipated.
“Our goal is to start in Cyprus as a testbed, expand to Europe and then go international.”
Where do you want EFEVRE TECH to be in the coming years, and what is the bigger vision behind the development of AMGEL?
The vision is not a single machine; it is an integrated quality ecosystem for science. AMGEL standardises execution. VITALE, the accompanying software, standardises documentation, automatically recording every step, parameter and result, so nothing depends on the researcher’s memory. BioSkepsis adds the third layer, unbiased interpretation. Together, they close the loop: from experiment, to recording, to publication, to verification.
Our goal is to start in Cyprus as a testbed, expand to Europe and then go international. The bigger vision behind AMGEL is simple to state and hard to achieve: to remove human error from every stage of research, from the bench to publication.
How challenging has the journey been so far? Were there individuals, companies and organisations that supported you in your early steps on a practical level?
The journey has been demanding, and we did not do it alone. At an academic and practical level, the University of Cyprus played a crucial role in the early stages; that is where the functionality of the first system was proven. The Research and Innovation Foundation provided financial support for development, which for a deep-tech company is the difference between continuing and stopping.
The trust of early partners was also critical: university and diagnostics institutions in Cyprus and abroad that agreed to test the system early on, including institutions such as the University of Cambridge, which uses it. On the components side, we relied on reliable manufacturers for individual materials, since AMGEL is an open system and integrates third-party submodules. And of course, none of this would have been possible without the team itself, engineers and programmers who believed in the solution from day one.
As for BioSkepsis: it started as the interpretive component of the ecosystem and evolved into a standalone product. It is a platform for evidence-based analysis of biomedical literature: instead of giving answers without sources, it grounds every finding in real publications, checks whether the papers someone cites actually support their claims, and identifies what relevant literature is missing. Its aim is to remove bias from how we read and use scientific knowledge, completing the logic that begins with AMGEL at the research bench.
