Technical Instruments
Providing State-of-the-Art Microscopy and Digital Imaging Products

Reese Allen, PhD, Director of Sales of Technical Instruments feels that high throughput image acquisition presents massive challenges in the areas of handling, storage and management of data in the biomedical industry. “Image acquisition systems must be designed to comply with company data protocols while providing the researcher flexibility,” says Dr. Allen. By providing microscopy and digital imaging products and services to the biomedical and industrial sectors, Technical Instruments helps customers overcome their challenges.
Headquartered in Burlingame, CA, Technical Instruments helps in designing and integrating instruments for the biotechnology industries. “We specialize in the supply, integration and networking of leading microscopy and digital imaging products. We complement these services with pre-sales consultancy, tailored system designs and first-rate technical and operational support,” notes Brian Lundy, President.

Technical Instruments currently has nine applications and service technicians, in addition to their sales team, to help support their customers. “We provide a full range of service and application support. We also help our customers write programs and macros to mechanize their image capture and analysis needs and to automate and integrate components of their imaging system,” says Lundy. The company has a machine shop on site and is able to fabricate custom parts to help customers put together the microscope and imaging system that works best for their applications. “We provide extended maintenance and warranty agreements to give our customers predictability and certainty in their budgeting process,” adds Dennis Milosky, CFO.

By helping customers with its unique microscopy products, Technical Instruments has a string of success stories attached to its name.

Partnering with academia, Technical Instruments is one of the earliest companies to license technology from Stanford University. The license agreement helped them to launch the first commercially available Nipkow Disk which was licensed to every major microscope manufacturer. We work ‘outside the box’ to design custom solutions for our customers,” says Lundy. In one instance, one of the company’s customers had a need to image at both very low magnification and very high magnification. Microscopes generally are designed to do only one way. Technical Instruments’ machine shop fabricated a system from two separate microscopes that allowed the user to switch between low and high magnification ranges without repositioning the specimen.

“Our key differentiation is the level of service that we provide our customers during and after the sale,” explains Lundy. “All our sales employees have backgrounds in science; most of them are doctorates and therefore, can directly relate to the challenges faced by customers,” he adds. The company has a strategic relationship with customers such as Nikon Instruments and Andor Technologies, and helps to find the best solutions for them. The company also provides after sales support that they believe is unmatched in the industry and it completely makes them unique in the market. For an elaborate understanding of the uniqueness of Technical Instruments consider the example of one of its customers that needed to couple a very high end confocal system to a large plate loader robotic system for large scale live cell imaging. Technical Instruments designed a custom incubation system which converted the entire workstation into a temperature and gas controlled environment and helped the client to solve their problem.

Going forward, the company wants to grow into a larger sales organization representing more microscopy related products. “The current trends lead us to believe that we will be expanding our support and integration business as our sales become increasingly more complex,” concludes Lundy.