The appearance is that of a large oven, inside it contains some compartments in which small, very small and micro test tubes are placed, single or inside plastic plates. At a certain point above them a mechanical arm rises which from time to time fills the first, second and last ones. It's called Omnia and it's the machine that every Italian hospital uses (or would like to use) to analyze the swabs impregnated with the nucleic acid of every possible carrier or patient of Covid 19. It is built by Masmec of Bari, a company founded and run by Michele Vinci for over 30 years, which simultaneously deals with robotics for cars and sophisticated biomedical equipment. Just like Omnia, which extracts the DNA and the RNA from the samples that are offered to it.
Masmec is located just outside Bari, in the territory of Modugno, the industrial municipality of the Apulian capital. 250 professionals work there in both the automotive and biomedical industrial sectors, very flexible and reconvertible to one and the other production because they are almost all technicians, computer or electronic engineers, as President Vinci himself explains during the visit . Masmec simply means "mechanical specialized machines", he founded it himself, in 1979, a young mechanical engineer graduated from the Turin Polytechnic, after having worked his way up first at Nuovo Pignone and then at Bridgestone in Bari.
Michele Vinci is a kind entrepreneur, one of those who never raises his voice, who considers employees part of the family, whose first thought, if things go well, is to find a way to reward them, and lastly, if they go badly, not to fire them. At the moment, from a production point of view, things are going very well: the biomedical company has never stopped, on the contrary, it has had a boom thanks to Omnia; and the robotic part for cars has only slowed down given the times. Which doesn't hurt, Michele Vinci is also a pleasant person from all points of view, who is never in a hurry and does not consider any curiosity too trivial. Before showing us the company and the Omnia machines in the assembled state and in their final form, he receives us in an all-white studio, furnished with a few basic pieces of furniture. We both speak through a mask. Thus, he says, Omnia was born.
“Our machines already extracted nucleic acids, for example that of AIDS; we wondered if using that reagent we could also highlight the RNA of the Corona virus. It worked and here we are,” he sums up in a nutshell. It must not have been quite as simple as he says, but the fact is that in the midst of the pandemic, more or less two months ago, the new car was born.
“Our customers from Adaltis, a company based in Rome but headquartered in Israel, wanted to try it right away, and asked us for ten immediately. PWe have received the order from Menarini for another four machines and finally the phone call from the governor Emiliano who asked us to also serve the Apulian hospitals ". The result was, among other things, that in one of the talk shows starring the regional presidents, the Apulian boasted to his Venetian colleague that the machines present in that area are "made in Puglia". And in fact he had the power, thanks to Masmec. On the other hand, if you ask Vinci who the competitors in Italy are, he thinks about it for a while and then, slyly, says: "I think I only have competitors in Germany."
When the company started, in addition to all the concerns about the performance of the machine, there were also those for men's health. "We were very anxious about the tests - says Vinci - we sent our technicians to the front line and we didn't know how it would end". Omnia can actually also be controlled remotely, but it is obvious that the first few times it must be guided by a field technician. “Everything went well, they all came back safe and sound, luckily,” he recalls with satisfaction. At the moment ten Omnias are being assembled while thirty are in production. Another forty have already been sold, in Italy and in some Eastern European countries.
How does Omnia work? We reach the computer engineer Sabrina Calamita who explains it to us.
“Do you know the figure in a mask with a syringe in his hand with which he injects something into a test tube? We see her on TV in every service that concerns the interior of a laboratory. Well, forget it. Omnia is both the biologist in the mask and the syringe. Obviously a technician exists and drives it from the outside electronically. But it is the mechanical arm inside the previously mentioned "oven" that withdraws, shakes and injects, with the precision that no human can afford. In any laboratory the error can escape, after all the human being has to push hundreds of pistons in the day and it can happen that he gets tired and something goes from one right side to the wrong one. With Omnia it can never happen”.
We list the steps, in a very elementary and certainly less scientific way than a technician would do.
- The swab taken from the person (usually a cotton swab passed down the throat and mouth) is placed in a test tube with a liquid reagent and shaken to allow the cells to be released. Those cells will also have the patient's first and last name because Omnia reads the barcode that has been assigned to each container.
- At this point the liquid to be analyzed is stirred and heated until DNA or RNA are separated and attracted by some sort of magnetic beads inserted into the contents.
- Now the fragments of nucleic acids must be amplified and captured to be finally brought into a plate composed of micro containers.
- At this point, the plate with these micro test tubes leaves Omnia and is taken to another much smaller "oven", the thermocycler, which establishes, after subjecting it to various temperature cycles, whether the sample is positive or not for Covid 19.
An hour and forty have passed since the first tampon entered Omnia, time during which up to 48 can be analysed. Once the operation is finished, the result is transmitted simultaneously to the healthcare facility that requested the analyses.
At the moment Masmec is also testing the breathability of some types of masks, the first garment that we will have to get used to wearing every time we leave the house when life will be crowded again as before.
“We created a temporary structure to do this – says Vinci – but someone asks us to think about an automation line. We see". It is the way in which the president of Masmec is used to facing small and big challenges: let's see.
