Selected issue: 2/2007

Following the successful ISO certification of our manufacturing sites, work is already under way to implement similar high standards in all of Tecan’s organizations around the world. The first sales organization, Tecan France, has now been certified according to ISO 13485, an international standard intended for medical device companies.

Scientists at the Staatliches Veterinäruntersuchungsamt (National Veterinary Laboratory) Arnsberg in Germany, responsible for veterinary diagnoses, have chosen Tecan’s Freedom EVO® workstation for the rapid detection of viruses which cause potentially devastating diseases.

The Freedom EVOlyzer, Tecan’s new generation of automated ELISA systems, has proved to be increasingly popular with laboratories throughout Spain since being introduced to the country in July 2006 by Inverness Medical Iberica (IMI), one of Tecan’s principle diagnostic distributors for the area.

Tecan’s GenePaint™ systems for automated, high throughput in situhybridization have been used to develop a groundbreaking, genome-wide atlas of gene expression in the adult mouse brain. / Tecan’s highly sensitive and extremely fast Safire2™ and Infinite™ F500 microplate readers off er seven different detection modes, saving valuable time for a wide range of high throughput applications in the biotech, pharmaceutical, research and cosmetics industries.

In recent months, even more collaborations with industry partners have come to fruition, bringing application-specific, automated laboratory systems to researchers working in a range of disciplines.

The German Red Cross Institute in Frankfurt is responsible for screening thousands of donated blood samples every day for blood banks in Germany and further afield. Scientists at the Institute have developed high throughput PCR-based testing methods to screen for a number of viruses, and samples are pooled prior to screening using three Tecan liquid handling workstations.

As a result of the relentless pace of today’s drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies face ever-increasing throughput demands for compound screening and lead identification. Many pharmaceutical companies have active screening libraries that contain hundreds of thousands or millions of compounds, and effective and reliable management of these samples is critical to drug development processes.

Over the last decade, the Livestock Improvement Association of Japan (LIAJ) has developed a DNA and beef sample database capable of parentage discrimination analysis for pedigree registration and individual identification of every head of cattle in Japan. To handle the large number of samples involved, scientists at LIAJ have chosen Tecan’s Freedom EVO® 200 workstation, with barcoded sample identification, for the automated extraction of DNA.

Tecan has teamed up with Cerionx Inc., the sole provider of automated pipette tip cleaning systems using ‘cold’ plasma, in an exclusive global distribution agreement for the supply and marketing of the Cerionx 8-channel TipCharger™ System.

Scientists at the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland, are collaborating with Tecan to optimize automated liquid handling systems for cell and tissue culture.

HS 800™ Pro Hybridization Station. Exiqon is a Danish biotechnology company that provides products and services for the life sciences, research and drug discovery industries all over the world.

Forensic scientists at the Landeskriminalamt police office in Stuttgart, Germany, have commissioned a semi-automated sample processing system from Tecan to handle about 20,000 crime scene samples it receives annually for genetic fingerprinting.

Researchers at Genomic Health Inc., California, are using several Freedom EVO® 200 workstations and a Genesis platform to automate the development and routine screening of gene panels for predicting the risk of recurrence and response to treatment of breast cancer.