INTEGRA’s focus on the niche but vital pipetting market has enabled it to bring innovative products to market, continually evolving in response to customer requests and changing workflows.
One of the company’s early innovations was the development of a novel tip-pipette interface – GripTips – that eliminates the pick-up inconsistencies and failures that lead to misalignment across a multichannel pipette, leakage or even tips falling off. With many multichannel interface designs, excessive force is required to load tips across all channels, often accompanied by time-consuming hand-tightening to guarantee a secure fit. GripTips feature a simple snap-on design that securely and effortlessly attaches the tip to any INTEGRA pipette, ensuring it is perfectly aligned and sealed, without any additional manipulation.
With scientists often required to transfer samples between different plate formats one at a time, the company developed VOYAGER, an electronic multichannel pipette offering automatic adjustment of tip spacing at the touch of a button. Single-handed, push-button adjustment of tip spacing allows parallel transfer of samples – from tubes to plates or 96- to 384-well formats – to be performed with ease, increasing speed and throughput.
Although the market for electronic pipettes is continually growing, manual pipettes remain popular – along with a demand for innovation. Traditionally, a single rotating plunger is used to set the pipetting volumes, an approach that requires frequent adjustment and can become tedious and time consuming, particularly when large volume changes are required. In response, INTEGRA designed the EVOLVE manual pipette, which features three number lock dials that are quickly and easily adjusted to the required volume.
Ergonomics is also an important consideration, so the compact ASSIST and ASSIST PLUS pipetting robots were launched to automate repetitive processes such as serial dilutions, reformatting and set-up of assay plates. Intuitive to use, the pipetting robots use the copmpany’s electronic multichannel pipettes to deliver flexible, reproducible and error-free pipetting at an affordable price. New applications are accessed simply by swapping to a different INTEGRA pipette, ensuring the systems will never become obsolete, and the pipettes can still be used manually when desired.
