The ARUP Institute for Clinical and Experimental Pathology® (ARUP), Salt Lake City, USA, has chosen the Freedom EVO liquid handling platform for automating RIA and ELISA assays, developing a novel 104-well microplate to increase sample throughput and simplify its workflow.
The development of the 104-well plate stemmed from a need for additional sample capacity when running radioimmunoassay (RIA). Mark Herrmann, Research Scientist, of ARUP’s advanced technology group, explained: “The samples are extracted in 96-well format. We realized that having extracted the full 96 samples we would need an additional two positions to accommodate the RIA control samples.” Tanya Sandrock, Research Scientist, of ARUP’s endocrinology R&D department continued: “This is a task that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is extremely labor intensive, so automation is very important.”
An extra column was incorporated by making custom hardware to accommodate additional tubes and strip plates which allowed automation on the Freedom EVO, significantly decreasing the time taken to run an assay. ARUP now plans to look at other assays to see where else the 104-well plate may be used to benefit the clinical laboratory. Mark concluded: “The 96-well format has been around for many years and is an integral part of the laboratory, but sometimes a little bit more is needed and the 104-well plate overcomes this problem. Tecan’s engineers were very open to this new challenge, and worked with us to achieve our goal.
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