Selected issue: 1/2024

The quantification of unique proteins within biological samples has traditionally required thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of cells, with no way to identify cellular heterogeneity within the populations. To overcome this issue, researchers at Brigham Young University have been evaluating the potential of single-cell dispensing to allow proteomic analysis of individual cells.

The vaccine development process has transformed dramatically in recent years, driven by the urgent need for effective immunization against emerging contagious diseases. Traditional pipelines for the creation of novel vaccines relied on more than 10 years of research, preclinical investigations and clinical trials, but advanced laboratory technologies have led the way to rapid vaccine development, production and upscaling. Automation has enabled vaccine research to go beyond the bounds of what was previously possible in terms of reliability and throughput, leading to faster progress and new ways of designing experiments. The Vaccines Global Bioprocess Development Platform at Sanofi has recently automated its miniaturized chromatography workflows to speed up downstream processing, achieving even greater productivity and efficiency for the company’s workflows.

Pathology is at the core of diagnostics, and obtaining reliable and timely results requires quick and accurate liquid handling. With laboratories often being pushed to their limits, automation can lend a helping hand and provide the ability to adapt to sudden workload increases. The R&D team at Sullivan Nicolaides Pathology is developing streamlined solutions to help its laboratories increase their throughput, and free up staff from tedious and error prone tasks. This includes creating new automation scripts to optimize existing diagnostics workflows, as well as designing new hardware to expand the range of pathology applications that are compatible with existing liquid handling platforms.

Many diagnostic laboratories rely on PCR-based tests to identify a range of illnesses, from gastrointestinal and respiratory infections to tropical diseases. However, processing the samples manually can be time consuming and prone to errors, limiting the number of tests that can be carried out in a day. Automation can increase throughput, but is not always practical for smaller laboratories that do not need to run hundreds or thousands of samples at a time looking for the same pathogen. Certest Biotec – a Spanish biotechnology company – has developed the VIASURE V-Flex, an automated and flexible workstation for nucleic acid extraction and PCR set-up, that can be used to run multiple different PCR reactions on a single plate.

Spatial genomics is a rapidly growing field, allowing researchers to explore gene expression in the context of tissue location. Vizgen has developed the MERSCOPE® Platform, the first commercial high multiplexing, high resolution in situ solution to combine single-cell and spatial genomics analysis. Powered by MERFISH technology, this system not only enables the visualization of gene expression, but also where – and to what abundance – genes are expressed in tissues.