The ever-increasing commercial pressures for rapid product development create significant technical and financial risks; finding an experienced development and manufacturing partner can mitigate these
Chelsea Technologies claims over 35 years experience in the design, development and manufacture of medical diagnostic and scientific instrumentation - from high volume, low cost point of care instruments through to fully automated laboratory analysis systems.
This experience has been gained by working in partnership with clients across the industry - ranging from technology start-ups to large multi-nationals.
John Attridge, life science director said: "Our expertise and practical experience in the design, development and manufacture of analytical instruments made us an ideal partner to work with Osmetech Molecular Diagnostics to develop the Opti Gene, an innovative, rapid and flexible PCR system which will enable genetic testing to be performed in the near point of care market".
The Opti Gene uses proven, well-accepted PCR technology.
The development challenge for Chelsea Technologies was to design a cost effective system that would provide a random access capability and fully independent thermal cycling of up to 12 sample tubes.
A novel, non-imaging, optics design was developed to allow a sensitive fluorescence measurement to be taken from each sample tube in real-time.
Full connectivity was achieved by embedding a PC card in the instrument, which allowed an intuitive graphic user interface to be presented on a touch panel LCD display.
Chelsea Technologies designed all aspects of the system from moulded consumables, electronics, embedded and user interface software, electro-optics and the mechanical design.
Chelsea Technologies is also working with Imperial College and MicroTest Matrices to develop a robust, competitively priced fluorescence reader for micro-arrays that will enable this exciting technology to move out of the research laboratory into commercial diagnostics markets.
Chelsea Technologies has designed a small electro-optics module that illuminates each micro-array spot in turn and also collects the fluorescence generated to produce a single integrated signal value.
This approach significantly reduces the amount of data generated and also the processing power required to analyse conventional scanned images.
Using this approach it is possible to produce results that are comparable to commercial scanning systems but at a fraction of the cost.
Chelsea Technologies is currently integrating the technology into a robust portable assay processing system for the rapid detection of infectious agents that can be deployed in the event of unexplained clusters of acute febrile illness/fatality or a potential terrorist incident.
