The story behind Orpine Lab Core
Precise work, built piece by piece.
The story behind Orpine Lab Core
Claire Padgett started Orpine Lab Core in 2018 after a long stretch at a contract research organisation where she noticed the same problem repeating itself: clients received a PDF of numbers with no real visibility into how those numbers were produced. Reagent lots changed mid-study without a note. Instruments drifted and nobody flagged it. The reports looked tidy, but the underlying process was a black box. She wanted to build a laboratory where every piece of the process was visible and, if necessary, replaceable.
The name came from a notebook doodle during the first week of fitting out the lab space. Orpinela is a made-up word that stuck because it sounded like something you could hold in your hand and turn over. BioCore followed because the work is always about finding the core measurement inside a complicated biological system. The first year was mostly ELISA development for a small biotech working on inflammatory markers. The second year brought a method-transfer project that took four months longer than planned because the original protocol had three undocumented steps buried in a researcher's email thread. That project shaped how Orpine Lab Core documents everything now.
Today the laboratory handles around thirty active projects at any one time, covering protein quantification, cell-based assays, and multiplex biomarker panels. Claire Padgett still runs samples personally on most projects, with support from two part-time analysts. The lab is closed on the last Friday of each month for a full instrument calibration and deep clean. If you want to understand how your data was produced, you can ask, and you will get a specific answer.
Claire Padgett spent eight years running analytical assays at a contract research organisation before deciding she wanted to build something she could take apart and put back together herself. She trained in biochemistry at the University of Leeds, then moved into method development for a mid-sized diagnostics firm where she spent three years optimising ELISA protocols for clinical trial samples. In 2018 she founded Orpine Lab Core with a single centrifuge, a secondhand plate reader, and a notebook full of process maps. She is particular about pipette calibration, keeps a physical logbook for every batch, and on slow Fridays she still runs gels by hand just to stay sharp.