INTEGRA Biosciences has awarded 31 EVOLVE manual pipettes, GRIPTIPS pipette tips and lab accessories to bioanalytical company DNTOX as part of its recent ‘INTEGRA supports start-ups’ competition.
DNTOX, based in Düsseldorf, Germany, specialises in chemical neurotoxicity testing and was founded in 2022 to assess the potential for environmental, pharmaceutical and dietary compounds to disturb the developing or adult human brain. The start-up’s neurotoxicity testing portfolio includes the proprietary Neurosphere Assay and AI software, which offer affordable and animal-free invitro screening methods for assessing chemical neurotoxicity within only 5-6 weeks.
The company is setting up its own independent laboratory space, and planning to hire several additional employees, so had an urgent need for multiple new liquid handling instruments. The prize bundle of pipettes, pipette tips and accessories for pipetting of volumes from 0.2 to 5000 μl will be used for plating 2D and 3D cell models in 96 well plates and for performing immunocytochemical staining and washing protocols. Different single and multichannel instruments of different volumes will be allocated to each liquid handling step and user to help avoid cross contamination and allow team members to work in parallel for greater testing throughput and time efficiency.
Dr Kristina Bartmann, Co-founder of DNTOX and Head of Research and Development, said: “Winning the EVOLVE pipettes and ECO rack GRIPTIPS from INTEGRA is a huge encouragement to our team. They will drastically speed up our liquid handling workflows and increase our overall testing capacity, supporting us in our aim to better protect developing and adult brains from neurotoxicological damage, as well as eliminate the use of animals in neurotoxicity testing; goals the DNTOX team is very passionate about.”
Read more about DNTOX and how it will use INTEGRA’s liquid handling solutions.
