Two contracts at a major pharmaceutical firm for low-volume high-throughput assay system
RTS Life Science International says it has won two contracts to supply its Assay Platform to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Stevenage. One is capable of supporting 1536 well assay plates.
Prime drivers at pharmaceutical companies, it says, are throughput and reagent cost.
In addition, it is important that expensive reader technologies are fully utilised in order to maximise investment. For these reasons, one of the two Assay Platforms has the distinction of being one of the first large scale, 1536-enabled systems in the UK.
RTS Life Science has incorporated a number of low volume liquid-handling systems, centrifuges, and a multi-modality plate imager onto the system in order to facilitate the effective completion of low volume assays in a high throughput manner.
Sprint 3 software, an inherent part of the Assay Platform, allows user configuration of an unlimited number of assay schedules and simplifies the instrumentation changes necessary to satisfy the user's changing requirements.
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.
Sprint's dynamic engine is aware of which devices on the system have redundant capacity and schedules plates through the system, instantly taking into account instrumentation availability.
The two Assay Platforms will feature many back-up instruments, even though each choice has been subjected to rigorous robustness and reliability trials.
An important element of Sprint is that if an individual instrument malfunctions, it will automatically re-schedule any part-completed plate so it completes the assay.
Exchanging instruments quickly is further facilitated by the improved i-Plate, whereby the smaller devices such as the reagent dispensers are mounted on a standard footprint plate, with the option of an in-built telescopic slide, allowing them to be substituted easily and redeployed in a number of different positions within the system.
The industrial robot which sits in the centre of the platform, has a 985mm working envelope and features specially designed 384 well plate and 1536 well plate handling grippers.
It boasts a +/-0.02mm repeatability, and its absolute encoders mean robot homing and time spent in periodic re-teaching of positions is eliminated.
The system includes a comprehensive safety interlock scheme and has been designed to secure both a CE Mark and a UL Field Listing.
