Automation is helping the University Hospital Münster to streamline its molecular diagnostics workflows, increasing throughput for Sanger sequencing and NGS library preparation.

Biopharmaceutical production is a complex process compared to small molecule drug manufacture, requiring the interaction of multiple biosynthesis pathways to create the target product. KBI Biopharma is using high throughput bioanalysis to gain an in-depth understanding of these biological processes, ensuring efficient, reproducible and scalable biomanufacturing processes.

Personalized medicine is on the horizon, and cell membrane lipidomics may hold the key. Italian biotechnology company Lipinutragen is studying the relationship between the membrane status and dietary and health conditions. A crucial part of the process is the isolation of mature red blood cells, which can be performed more precisely and reproducibly using laboratory automation than by manual processing.

Automation offers many benefits for bioprocess development involving multiple microbial strains, yet few off-the-shelf platforms are capable of combining liquid handling tasks with microscale cultivation. The Microbial Bioprocess Lab at Forschungszentrum Jülich needed a customized platform to support its research, and turned to the Tecan Integration Group for a solution that has improved its microbial cultivation workflows.

Continuous advances in medical understanding are leading to rapid growth in the demand for diagnostic testing, making automation essential for laboratories trying to address this increase in their workloads. Many providers are also centralizing and consolidating testing to reduce costs, relying on instruments with higher throughput capacities to meet the demands of large service laboratories. Spanish biotechnology company Vircell recently partnered with Tecan to create a high throughput automated system for its VirClia® assays, building on the success of the company’s existing VirClia instrument.

Virology testing at a molecular level is crucial for a fast and sensitive initial diagnosis, but its role doesn’t stop there. Clinicians frequently request retrospective analysis, sometimes as a means of monitoring drug response or identifying drug resistance, and also increasingly to understand the underlying mechanisms that lead to, for example, organ rejection. The San Raffaele Hospital in Milan has developed an automated archiving system that allows safe and accurate collection of clinical samples, as well as easy access and retrieval when further testing is required.

Biomanufacturing requires careful separation of the molecule of interest from other cellular products to ensure the quality and stability of the final product. This is even more important for the manufacture of biotherapeutics, as the presence of unwanted molecules in pharmaceutical preparations can affect the efficacy and safety of biologically-derived drugs. FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies is using automated chromatography condition screening to generate more data in less time, helping to improve the performance of purification processes and accelerate biological drug manufacturing.

Tecan has further extended the flexibility of the Freedom EVO Liquid Handling (LiHa) Arm with the launch of a 5 ml disposable tip. Previously only available to Tecan customers working with fixed tips, the unrivalled pipetting volume range offered by the LiHa Arm can now be exploited by customers who require the highest levels of sample security.

The biosimilars market is expanding rapidly as the patents expire for an increasing number of high profile biopharmaceutical agents. The complex nature of biologics requires extensive characterization of the production techniques and in vivo effects of new biosimilars before they can be released onto the market. Coherus Biosciences is using advanced laboratory automation to help screen chromatography conditions as part of its downstream purification processes for new biosimilars.

Mass spectrometry is rapidly becoming the method of choice for quantitative analysis of micronutrients such as vitamins B1, B6, B12 and D, as well as for steroids, hormones and many other drugs. For clinical laboratories, the bottleneck of MS-based techniques is not the analysis, but the pre-processing of the samples to remove proteins and other biological molecules that could interfere with the results.

Synthetic biology is, quite literally, the creation of new genetic constructs and novel micro-organisms with innovative functions. Together with systems biology, it provides a platform for translating advances in genomics, proteomics and molecular biology into real-world applications.

The industrialization of biology has become possible thanks to the automation of repetitive tasks – such as liquid handling – making 24/7 operation feasible. This cost-saving automation addresses several major concerns for biology workflows.

Testosterone levels are typically determined using automated immunoassay analyzers, but this has limitations. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MSMS) offers a selective and accurate alternative, and the Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine at the University of California San Diego is using a novel extraction technology to automate sample preparation for this technique.

The success of hematopoietic stem cell donation is highly dependent on a close match between the donor and recipient human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles. DKMS Life Science Lab performs HLA typing of over a million potential donors a year, relying on automation to provide a cost-effective, high quality solution that delivers reliable high sample throughput.

Specialist laboratories engaged in molecular genetics and cytogenetics are turning to automation to cope with ever-increasing sample numbers, implementing tailored solutions designed to handle a range of materials and meet specific testing needs.

Receptor binding assays form an integral part of the preclinical screening service provided by Eurofins Pharma Discovery Services division. The first stage of the protocol is the transfer of tissue samples to a 96-well plate, a process that must be carefully performed to avoid any cross-contamination.

Our automation laboratory serves principally the lead optimization stage of drug discovery, so we receive several hundred samples per week from medicinal chemistry labs,” said Dr Claude Dufresne, Senior Investigator, who has been working at the Merck site since 1988 and has been developing automation methods and systems for most of the past ten years. “From those samples, we prepare serial dilution plates for distribution to various biological assay laboratories and for our own uses. We also store the samples in order to supply biology labs with samples for retesting and secondary assays; that’s why we needed the SSS