Automated production system for high throughput screening, the acCellerator, from RTS Thurnall, AstraZeneca, Essen Instruments, and Corning, is unveiled
The acCellerator, a system that completely automates the production of adherent cell lines for high throughput screening (HTS), has been unveiled during a press conference at the Society for Biomolecular Screening (SBS) conference.
The system, which interfaces with newly designed, automation-friendly T225cm cell culture flasks, comprises a combination of tried and tested laboratory instruments, three industrial robots, and new generation dispensing equipment, all housed in a custom-designed Class II cabinet.
Four diverse companies worked jointly on the project and included RTS Thurnall, AstraZeneca, Essen Instruments, and Corning Incorporated.
Elaine Sullivan, the head of AstraZeneca's Global Advanced Technologies Laboratory, commented, "We brought this multi-party venture together for each company's unique technical and intellectual expertise. We believe that acCellerator will address a labourious aspect of cell-based HTS.
From our end-user perspective, acCellerator will introduce efficiencies, increasing the number of assays which we can support and allowing a more homogeneous, repeatable approach. Perhaps most importantly, acCellerator will create more time for our specialist staff." acCellerator takes the processes performed within manual cell culture and totally redefines them with automation to achieve the same results.
This allows RTS Thurnall to deploy standard pharmaceutical instrumentation combined with industrial robots to provide the sort of robust, flexible solution which has become the company's trademark. Chris Walsh, RTS Thurnall's project manager for acCellerator, explained: "To reproduce and exceed the results achieved by manual cell culture, we needed to overcome quite a few handling issues, while not compromising the system's sterility.
We were not tempted to mimic the manual process exactly; however, by thinking laterally, we have come up with some simple, but totally innovative solutions.
This has allowed us to integrate proven, commercially available technology and schedule the whole process efficiently via our standard Sprint software platform." Traditional manual cell culture is a highly skilled, though occasionally unpredictable, task. Ensuring that the cells reproduce to the required density, whilst not becoming contaminated, is no mean feat.
The process has many steps, several of which require great dexterity.
Currently, screening can only run 3 - 4 days a week owing to the time it takes to generate plate cells.
RTS Thurnall believes it has designed an automated system capable of running unattended over a weekend, thus preparing cells for screening at the start of a week.
At the centre of acCellerator's ingenuity lies a new product from Essen Instruments.
Called the Pipeline, it will replace the scientists' manual pipetting operations and is able to both aspirate and dispense under computer control.
The acCellerator has seven of these devices, used to handle the various cell media, washing, dissociation and other system reagents.
In order to simplify flask handling, and also to avoid potential contamination, which is essential during aspirating and dispensing operations, Corning has manufactured a new 'automation-friendly' flask, which has a removable cap on its flat upper surface, in addition to the existing end cap. The system supports the manipulation of two different cell lines simultaneously, and is designed to be capable of delivering 180 microtitre plates in less than ten hours, while taking typically only 40 minutes to seed each new batch of flasks.
This compares with two or three days with traditional cell culture techniques. A flask picking robot first removes each flask from the custom designed Kendro incubator carousels and places each within the Class II cabinet for processing by the system.
A smaller, track mounted, flask handling robot then decaps the flasks and delivers them in turn to the various dispensers, before depositing each on one of the four 37C warming plates, following addition of the dissociation reagent.
Following incubation, each flask is then transferred to a flask tapping unit, which has been custom designed to detach the adherent cells from the bottom of the flask, by simulating the manual flask tap action.
After the addition of media, as required, a sample of the resulting 'cell soup' is then passed to the integrated Innovatis Cedex cell counter where the density of cells is measured on-line.
Any additional media may be added at this stage to achieve the desired cell density.
The plate handling robot picks an empty microtitre plate from one of the nine stack Kendro plate incubator carousel, removing its lid at the vacuum delidding unit prior to placing it in a LabSystems Multidrop liquid dispenser. This eight-channel instrument then dispenses the required amount of 'cell soup' into the plate's 384 wells, following which the lid is replaced, and the plate returned to the incubator.
