Researchers at the life sciences company Genomic Health, California, USA, have chosen Tecan's liquid handling workstations to automate the development of Genomic's multi-gene expression assay
The assay predicts the risk of recurrence of cancer and the likelihood of chemotherapy benefit in a large portion of early-stage breast cancer patients.
Jay Snable, director of process automation, explained: "We needed automated systems for our ongoing assay development and we chose Tecan for its highly flexible technology.
"Tecan provided the best solutions for handling all the different formats we need, from single tubes through to 384-well microplates, in a highly integrated system with quality controls all the way.
"We have developed a gene panel to quantify the likelihood of breast cancer recurrence, and we are currently looking at 761 genes in an initial screen to create a gene profile for an assay to test for risk of recurrence of another cancer type - this is where the Tecan technology will prove especially useful for the high throughput we need to achieve".
Based on Tecan's Freedom EVO 200 and Genesis platforms, all assay steps after RNA extraction are automated, from RNA quantification and quality control, reverse transcription and quantitative PCR assay assembly.
The workstations are also equipped with a PosID System for automated barcode scanning and identification to track individual samples through all the assay steps.
