Fernando Martín de Lara, CEO of 300K Solutions: "The funding of CDTI Innovation and FEDER funds came at the right time to accelerate our biological conservation solution at room temperature"

There are problems that coexist with us for decades without anyone stopping to question them at the root. The preservation of biological samples is one of them. Since clinical research, diagnosis and drug development depend on tissues, plasma or DNA, the response has always been the same: cold, very cold. Ultra-freezers plugged into the network, transport chains that can’t be broken for a moment, high costs and a carbon footprint that nobody celebrates. Fernando Martín de Lara, CEO of 300K Solutions, decided to ask the question that apparently no one had asked before: What if there was another way?

The company 300K Solutions was born out of that concern. Based in Salamanca, a city that Martín de Lara claims as proof that first-class technological innovation can also emerge from the so-called "emptied Spain", the company has built a solution that aspires to completely change how the world conserves and stores biological samples. Fifteen people work in it today, all university graduates and several with doctorates, eight of them dedicated exclusively to the R&D department.

Sample Stabilizer Equipment, S3

Betting everything on R&D

The shareholding structure of 300K Solutions reflects its DNA well: the founding partners, with executive functions, maintain the majority of the property, together with Meins Consulting, a company in the field of renewable energies with a strong R&D component, and a third financial partner. It is a company that, in the words of its CEO, "is in losses, as foreseen in the business plan", because everything it generates is reinvested in continuing to develop a technology that, he insists, "did not exist worldwide" when they began.

The portfolio is articulated around two elements that work in tandem: the S3 Sample Stabilizer Kit and reagent kits designed to stabilize different types of biological samples. A complete, closed, ready-to-use solution. Its clients are public and private biobanks, hospitals, research centers, contract research organizations and pharmaceutical companies. So far this year, around 300,000 euros in sales, with 40% coming from the national market and the rest of Europe, where Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria are its main markets. They contemplate making the leap to the United States and Canada, but Martin de Lara prefers to consolidate the European base first: the costs of crossing the Atlantic justify going step by step.

The pandemic named the problem

To understand what 300K Solutions does, you need to first understand what problem it solves. "The current way to stop the degradation of the markers that exist in biological samples is through freezing," explains Martín de Lara. And freezing involves huge, always plugged, ultra-freezers, “with a very significant impact on the carbon footprint.” Added to that are the costs of cold transport, which he bluntly describes as “a real nonsense” and the permanent risk that a technical failure will spoil years of stored work.

The COVID-19 pandemic put this problem in the spotlight brutally. The difficulties in maintaining operating cold chains in conditions of global emergency evidenced the fragility of a system that everyone took for granted. And it was then that the founding question of 300K Solutions became even more urgent: Why had no one applied lyophilization, a technique well known in the pharmaceutical and food industry, to the stabilization of biological samples? The answer was not in the lack of technology, but in the complexity of adapting it. "Lyophilization needs to be developed adhoc for each type of sample," he explains. "And that is what we have done: standardizing, homogenizing, the way of doing something that if done individually does not make sense, however, used in a standardized and ready-to-use way generates added value that ends all the problems of freezing," he adds.

Loading of equipment with biological samples to be lyophilized
 

Turn the complex into something simple

The process is based on sublimation: remove the water molecules from the sample and replace them with a mixture of excipients developed and validated specifically for each biomolecule. Without available water, biological degradation reactions and the action of microorganisms are no longer possible. The samples, sealed under vacuum in vials inside the equipment itself, can be kept stable at room temperature, with a maximum of 25 degrees and 65% relative humidity, for the same time as their equivalent preserved at -80 degrees continuously and unaltered.

The most relevant technical achievement of these years, developed together with Meins Consulting, has been a temperature transmitting plate that distributes heat homogeneously, eliminating the so-called edge effect: the tendency of the vials located at the ends of the equipment to receive more energy than those of the center, which would compromise the uniformity of the process. An innovation already patented.

But perhaps the most demanding challenge has been another: getting hardware and excipients to work in perfect synchrony. Turn something extraordinarily complex into something that any laboratory can use without specialized training. "The great technical challenge has been to develop the process that allows the industrialization of technology to be used autonomously and by validating third parties by pressing a single button," summarizes Martín de Lara. Making the complex simple: that is, in essence, the ambition of 300K Solutions.

There is no advantage, there are many

One of the most interesting aspects of the 300K Solutions proposal is that its value is not generic: it changes depending on who uses it. For a pharmacist, the advantage lies in the savings in transporting samples from the collection centers to the central laboratory. For a clinical diagnostic laboratory, in the possibility of preserving biological remnants for subsequent analysis, just as pathologists do today with paraffin blocks. For a research laboratory, in being able to analyze all the samples at once, without the deviations introduced by the staggered analysis as they arrive.

And for biobanks, perhaps the most directly benefited customer, the equation has several dimensions at once. "In addition to sleeping quietly without being aware of when an ultrafreezer fails," says Martín de Lara, the technology reduces the energy consumption not only of the appliances themselves, but also of the air conditioning systems that maintain the rooms where they are located. A chain of savings that accumulates over the years.

The multiplier effect of innovation

The development of the BIORT project has been supported by the CDTI Innovation and the cofinancing of the European ERDF funds. For a company in the start-up phase, with all the turnover reinvested in R&D, this accompaniment has meant much more than a financial complement. "Support has been essential," says Martín de Lara. “Without it 300K Solutions would have been embroiled in serious funding problems that would have ended up with a strong dilution of the founding team with the potential risk of demotivation associated with it.” The aid also came at the right time: "Just when we needed to complete and develop the evolutions of the initial prototypes, both in the hardware and in the reagent part."

Beyond the project, Martín de Lara argues that "the only way to grow as a country in the long term is to generate a change of productive model and move to one based on disruptive technology." 300K Solutions employs 15 people from Salamanca and the impact multiplies: local suppliers open new production lines, Meins Consulting has launched Thawi, a thermal self-consumption team, and has created a new hydrogen company in situ. "From one project come others," he summarizes.

In terms of Agenda 2030, the project contributes to SDG 7 (clean energy), SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 3 (health and welfare) and SDG 9 (industry and innovation), articulating a technological response with global effect from Salamanca.

cell stabilizer kit

A change that is already inevitable

Martín de Lara has no doubts about where the sector is heading, although he acknowledges that the deadlines are difficult to predict. "This is the vision of the company: to change the way biological samples are stabilized and stored. And it will happen, sooner or later."

What stops mass adoption is not the lack of scientific evidence, but the inertia in the face of change: “We’re in the 21st century, all of today’s needs are met, in whatever form, and people struggle to change.” But we also live, he recalls, "the most exciting and innovative moment of humanity", and there are more and more people with the ability to see applications to disruptive technologies that today are inconceivable. When that happens at scale, the entry of this technology into the markets, he concludes, "will be unstoppable."

CDTI Innovation

The Center for Technological Development and Innovation, CDTI E.P.E. It is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, whose objective is the promotion of technological innovation in the business environment. The mission of the CDTI is to ensure that the Spanish business fabric generates and transforms scientific and technical knowledge into globally competitive, sustainable and inclusive growth. In 2025, within the framework of the Strategic Plan 2024-2027, the CDTI provided 2,423 million euros of support to Spanish companies and startups.

 
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