Rusty Bishop, PhD, serves as chief commercial officer at TubeWriter. Trained as a biochemist, he brings both lab experience and commercial insight to improving everyday research processes. His work centers on helping scientists reclaim time and consistency in sample management through smarter labeling solutions.
Q: If it can take only one missing label to throw off an entire experiment, why do labs still rely on handwriting and stickers to track critical samples?
Rusty Bishop, PhD, chief commercial officer at TubeWriter.
CREDIT: TubeWriter
A: It’s legacy. It’s one of those things that just stuck around for decades. Every scientist has done it since the Sharpie was invented—or before that, probably with a pencil. Every part of the lab has seen innovation: automation, liquid handlers, all these amazing tools. But labeling got overlooked.
When I started out, it was, “Here’s your labels, here’s your tubes, go to town.” Then came the small thermal printers that spit out barcode stickers, but that’s still old technology. There’s no automation, no real time saving, no thought behind it. It just became part of how people work, and no one ever thought to innovate on it.
Q: You’ve worked in and visited a lot of labs. What have you seen when it comes to labeling in the real world?
A: I’ve seen just about everything—Sharpies, masking tape, stickers that don’t stick. My own handwriting’s terrible, so I’ve been that person who ran the critical experiment, froze the samples, and left them for the next scientist who couldn’t read a thing. I’ve dug through liquid nitrogen freezers trying to find the right cell line or protein because the labels smeared or fell off.
Some labs try to fix it with tape or extra steps. I was at one site where they printed sticky labels, then wrapped tape around each one so it wouldn’t peel off in the freezer. It still did.
And it’s not just isolated cases. I’ve been part of teams that have spent nights labeling. One customer told me they literally buy pizzas and have everyone sit down to label 6,000 tubes. Another lab I worked with in France was pre-labeling 2,000 tubes every morning before they could even start collecting samples. That’s just what people do to keep up.
Q: How do the costs of labeling show up in daily lab work?
A: The first cost is rework. If a label falls off or no one can read it, you have to redo the experiment. That’s wasted samples, wasted reagents, and wasted time. It sounds small until you start adding it up.
Most labs think they label a few hundred tubes a day, but that’s never true. Take something as simple as isolating proteins from twenty cell lines. You start with twenty tubes, then you spin them down and aliquot the samples so you have backups. That doubles the count right there. Add a few DNA extractions, positive and negative controls, a couple of replicates, and you’re at a hundred tubes before lunch.
Now multiply that across ten people in the lab. That’s thousands of tubes a day, not hundreds. Each one takes half a minute or more with a Sharpie or sticky label. Over a week, you’ve lost hours to nothing but labeling. And if one label is wrong, or falls off, you lose even more time redoing the work.
That’s why I compare the current labeling process to Uber. No one knew they had a taxi problem until Uber came along. It’s the same with labeling. You don’t realize how much of your day disappears until you stop and think about it. Most of the scientists who come to TubeWriter are at that stage—they’ve just done the math and realized how much science they’re losing to stickers and handwriting.
Q: What is TubeWriter, and how does it work?
A: TubeWriter is a direct-to-labware print system that replaces handwriting and stickers. It uses a fine inkjet head to place UV-curable ink on the surface of a tube, then sets the mark instantly with light. The cured ink bonds to the plastic or glass, creating a label that stays legible through freezing, thawing, or solvent exposure.
It sits in the middle of the labeling world. On one side are Sharpies and stickers—cheap but slow and unreliable. On the other are large industrial robots built for massive, single-format batches. TubeWriter bridges that gap. It gives labs automation that fits their daily work, fast enough to keep up but flexible enough for every kind of experiment.
Q: What kinds of tubes or labware can it print on?
A: Almost anything a scientist puts in front of it. We’ve printed on NMR tubes that are barely thicker than a pencil and on large bottles used for cell culture. The printer adjusts to the height and diameter of each item, so the same system can handle 50-milliliter conicals, 15-milliliter conical tubes, Eppendorfs, PCR strips, and cryovials without changing hardware.
People send us the strangest things to test. We’ve labeled the caps of frozen tubes pulled from liquid nitrogen, the sides of 96-well plates, even the metal caps on HPLC vials. Our team likes those challenges; it’s part of what makes the system flexible. If it fits under the print head, we can usually print on it.
Q: How do labs work TubeWriter into their daily routines?
A: It depends on the lab. Some teams batch-label before a big collection day. They’ll load racks of cryovials and print a thousand labels in about an hour. Others keep a TubeWriter at the bench so scientists can print what they need as they go. High-throughput sites run several systems in parallel, labeling tens of thousands of tubes a day. The setup adapts to how people already work instead of forcing a new routine.
The ROI shows up quickly. A typical lab can label about 1,000 tubes an hour with TubeWriter, or around 600 if they’re not aiming for maximum speed. By hand, that same job takes four to five hours. One large pharma customer measured the difference and found they were saving about three hours for every 1,000 tubes—roughly three hours per week times 52 weeks equals 156 hours per scientist.
Q: What kind of reaction do you get when people see TubeWriter in action for the first time?
A: It’s the first job I’ve ever had where a customer hugged me. They saw the print come out clean and just said, “Thank you.” It’s that kind of relief when people realize how much time they’re getting back.
Reactions vary. Some labs see it and immediately get it. Others look at the system and wonder what this black box is doing on their bench. That’s why we spend time on post-sale training. We bring the team together, show them the simple three-step process of loading a rack, uploading tube identifiers, and pressing print. Once they see how easy it is to use and how it fits into their workflow, the skepticism disappears.
That’s the part I enjoy most. It’s not about the machine. It’s about what happens next: scientists doing science again instead of spending hours peeling stickers.
