RTS Thurnall has combined industrial robotics and technology to create the first advanced Assay Platform capable of supporting high throughput screens
Andrew Ormrod, RTS Thurnall's product manager, explained: "Our previous high throughput screening systems have been capable of handling 1000 plates in five days.
We are confident that our Assay Platform will be capable of significantly more, because it will be limited not by the handling or robotic speed, but only by the other instrumentation making up the assay system. Perhaps more importantly, its flexibility will allow it to adapt speedily to different or complex assays.
With some laboratory equipment being extremely costly, it is essential that nothing is left standing idle.
Therefore, we have designed our Assay Platform in such a way that any of its instruments can be easily removed and quickly configured and replaced.
This approach also means that our clients aren't tied to any one instrument vendor." The Assay Platform's inherent flexibility, is, in large part, due to its Sprint 3 software which is also being released this summer.
Sprint allows the user to reconfigure the system to either begin a new assay or incorporate new equipment. This means that developing a new assay will now take under an hour, while, thanks to the ActiveDriver, adding a new device will only take a few minutes.
Exchanging instruments quickly is further facilitated by i-Plate, whereby the smaller devices such as the reagent dispensers are mounted on a standard footprint plate, allowing them to be substituted easily and redeployed in a number of different positions within the system.
Another important feature of Sprint 3 is 'virtual storage', a new facility, which, by recording sample storage data, enables a complex schedule of incubator use at different points in the assay, even allowing the subdivision of incubators into a number of 'virtual incubators'.
The industrial robot which sits in the centre of the platform, has a 985mm working envelope and features a specially designed plate handling gripper.
It boasts a +/-0.02mm repeatability and its absolute encoders mean robot homing is eliminated.
Its industrial Adept controller has a multi-tasking programming language supporting industry standard i/o DeviceNet architecture to which intelligent or non intelligent nodes can be added if the system needs to be expanded.
