Selected category: OEM Components

By Claudio Bui and Yves Wurmitzer

Innovating, developing and bringing a new automated liquid handling product to market quickly, before requirements and needs change, is no easy feat. A software development kit (SDK) supporting your platform and components enables your developers to spend less time worrying about how to control robotic components and more time creating optimal interactions between the end-user and their application. Let’s look in more detail at what a robotics SDK is, what features it should have, and what benefits the right SDK can bring to your development timeline.

By Manuel Bauer 

Advances in the treatment of disease, such as the many different types of cancer and cardiac diseases, mean that organ and bone marrow transplantation is on the rise.¹ This rise has in turn generated an increased need for accurate immunosuppressant drug (ISD) monitoring. This 3-part blog series will walk you through the challenges of adapting gold standard mass spec methods such as LC-MS/MS for ISD monitoring, and explore ways to avoid the associated pitfalls.

By Claudio Bui

Lab automation and liquid handling solutions are evolving rapidly, shaped by many of the same forces and disruptive technologies that define the fourth industrial revolution. Alongside Industry 4.0, you could say that the era of Liquid Handling 4.0 has arrived. In today’s fast-paced environment where engineers need to develop and adapt analytical platforms rapidly to address new markets and ever-changing applications, the choice of core robotics architecture and components can be crucial for success. Here are some important questions to ask when selecting OEM components and robotic platforms for automated liquid handling.

By Claudio Bui

Analytical instrumentation is evolving so fast that engineers run the risk of their robotic platforms becoming obsolete before the development cycle can be completed.  The competitive life science instrumentation market is expanding at an impressive 8.2% CAGR and is projected to be worth $85 Billion by 2022.¹ To keep ahead of the rapid rate of change, having a strategic OEM partner that is committed to continuous innovation and improvement is crucial.  How can you be sure that your automation components provider or OEM partner has what it takes to help you deliver your automated liquid handling solution with the reliability and performance your customers expect? Here are some important questions to consider.

By Maria Liwanag

The syringe pump is the workhorse of any automated liquid handling instrument. A single syringe pump may complete one cycle every second, and as many as 4 million cycles in its lifetime. Keeping your pump syringes and components in top condition will allow them to run smoothly and deliver their best performance. Over time, syringes may start to wear, and therefore volumetric and positional precision and accuracy are likely to decline. Maintenance and replacement will restore its performance.

By David Wold 

The impact of pump pressure sensors on your automated liquid handling pump performance is often underestimated and underappreciated. The saying, “You don't know what you’ve got ‘till it's gone” applies to many things in life – including fluidic pumps. When device sensors are doing their jobs, the end-user will never know, but when the sensor feature fails to perform, the consequences can be costly and catastrophic. Today’s smart technologies empower pressure sensor functionality more than ever. Why are pump pressure sensors essential for automated liquid handling systems? What benefits do they offer? How do they increase functionality and address process security risks?

By David Wold

With high-throughput genomics impacting every corner of biology, the demand for more efficient Next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows is growing rapidly. Automating the process of NGS sample preparation is crucial to avoid inaccuracies due to human error, bottlenecks that delay sequencing results, and the additional expense of re-running sequences. What are the most important factors for an engineer to consider when selecting a pump to meet the stringent performance required for an automated NGS library preparation system?

By David Wold

Today’s hematology labs are faced with escalating demands to deliver robust and accurate blood test results quickly. At the heart of automated diagnostic systems for blood analysis are liquid handling pumps, which must deliver precise and accurate results every time. As well as being reliable, they must also be affordable and easy to maintain. Unfortunately, not all pumps deliver to these exacting standards. What are the most important factors for an engineer to consider when selecting a pump to meet the stringent performance required for a hematology automation system?

By David Wold

From the perspective of a lab automation systems engineer, specifying the optimal liquid handling pump and associated fluidic components is often central to the design process, especially for products that will be used in a clinical lab or other highly regulated environments. What questions should you ask in order to select a pump that can handle all of your system’s intended applications? Here’s what our liquid handling experts from Tecan's OEM Partnering team have to say.

By Severin Heynen

Improving lab procurement processes involves more than just putting e-procurement or lab management software in place. In most cases accessing, managing and analyzing the data that you use to support purchase decisions and feed into e-procurement tools is still a big challenge. In previous articles, we explored the value of automated collection of usage data from lab instruments and robotics. What capabilities and features should you look for when deciding which tools will best support your needs? Here are our top picks.

By Claudio Bui

When you design a complex laboratory automation system or device, every OEM liquid handling component that you integrate into it should be reliable, dependable and expected to perform to the highest industry standards.  Subpar quality is not an option. If the intended use of the system includes critical tests for clinical diagnostic purposes, the consequences of failure or poor performance of liquid handling components could be more costly than you bargained for, including irreparable damage to your company’s reputation and even worse – it could pose serious risks to patients’ health. Integrating components into your system that are reliable and have a durable design should be an essential consideration.

By Claudio Bui

The demand for advanced medical and diagnostic testing continues to accelerate. Laboratories, hospitals, and emerging consumer genomics companies are demanding quicker test sequences resulting in the design and development of new innovative and responsive test protocols. These new tests include the handling of a wide array of fluids. The measurement, monitoring, mixing, and controlling of solvents, salts, detergents, acids, bases, reagents, and additives is critical in all liquid handling lab environments.

By Markus Vogler

The last decade has seen dramatic changes in the world of diagnostics, with experts even referring to the present time as the start of the fourth industrial revolution. Digitalization, along with other technological advances such as the increased use of automation and robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, is impacting every industry from manufacturing to pharmaceutical biotechnology. These technologies, as well as breakthrough research in various fields such as gene editing, stem cell technology and regenerative medicine, are having a huge impact on the clinical diagnostics industry.

By Nicholas Smith

As  sequencing grows significantly in China, how are Chinese home-grown companies making the most of it?

In December 2017, the UK and China announced a joint initiative to advance collaboration in science and innovation¹. The first bilateral science and innovation strategy of its kind to be developed by China jointly with another country, the UK-China Joint Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation builds on existing collaborations dating back to 2014, and represents yet another step change in China’s efforts to grow their leadership in healthcare markets. On the back of initiatives such as this, China’s home-grown companies are forging new partnerships internationally, and are well positioned to flourish as a result.

By Claudio Bui

When introducing a new product to the automated liquid handling market, getting there first with high quality and reliable hardware is vital to capturing and maintaining early market leadership. How can you gain that advantage when you have to balance requirements for customized high-performance robotics against an accelerated product launch?

By Claudio Bui

When designing products that include automated liquid handling, how do you decide when and what to buy from an OEM components supplier vs. designing in-house? How do you then decide who will be the right partner for you?  A well-planned “make versus buy” analysis and OEM-components partnering strategy can significantly augment the expertise of your own team. It can free up internal resources for other projects, reduce long-term costs, and ultimately help get your products to market faster.

By Claudio Bui

Everyone knows if you work harder and faster you’ll get done sooner, but then many are left wondering why they didn’t get to market first. It may seem simple, but when it comes to life science laboratory automation it’s not as easy as it seems.