Genetix makes first sale of cell picker
said it had received orders from leading pharmaceutical groups for
two of its new products.
The UK's Genetix, which makes gene and protein research equipment, said it had received orders from leading pharmaceutical groups for two of its new products.
Julian Burke, chief scientific officer, said the products would help the company "move further up the drug development value chain into manufacturing."
Genetix said that a leading US pharmaceutical group had placed a £100,000 (€141,000) order for ClonePix, a machine that selects mammalian cell colonies from cell cultures and is claimed to be the first of its kind.
The ClonePix is capable of automatically imaging, recognising and picking mammalian cell colonies from either semi-solid media or monolayers growing on cell culture dishes. This is the first step in the production and selection of monoclonal antibodies and other cells used in the production of biopharmaceuticals, noted Genetix.
Meanwhile, two of the top three pharmaceutical companies - said to be GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer in the Financial Times - have also placed orders for its automated dispensing instrument aliQuot, a desktop machine that uses a proprietary fast pressure-timing dispense mechanism to fill a 1536-well plate with one microlitre in under 30 seconds.
Low volume dispensing is economically beneficial to pharmaceutical companies when testing compounds with reagents that can cost thousands of dollars per millilitre.
Another feature of the aliQuot that reduces the cost of assays is a backfilling function allowing unused compound or reagent remaining in the dispensing pipes to be flushed back into the reservoir bottle for future use.
Genetix has also launched a line of low profile 384-well plates for use in bioresearch applications. The low height profile (10 mm) of the new plates leads to real gains in storage capacity - typically saving up to a third in valuable freezer space, says the company.
The 384-well plates offer full compatibility with the majority of liquid handling equipment making them particularly suitable for high throughput use.
