By monitoring cell culture conditions prior to HTS, this could eliminate potentially invalid screens, wasted compounds, lost time and discarded data. By profiling key cellular performance indicators, such as apoptotic state, viability, cell cycle, transfection efficiency allows a lab to establish uniform standards of cellular performance.
In addition because the reagents and detailed protocols have been optimised, assay development time is reduced making it easy to perform single-cell based assays.
The Easycyte system is a microlitre-scaled cell analysis bench top instrument, aimed at researchers in drug discovery within biotech or pharmaceutical companies. It consists of software for data acquisition, analysis and archiving and a selection of reagents, for cell monitoring and screening in single, precise systems. The Guava Easycyte also offers integrated, turnkey operations.
The Guava Easycyte is the latest addition to Guava's range of Personal Cell Analysis systems, which includes the Guava PCA and the Guava PCA-96, and is designed to save precious cells and reagents reducing potentially hazardous biological waste. Only a few microlitre of samples, such as cultured and blood cells, are required for each experiment.
The Guava EasyCyte system uses a blue laser with up to 3-colour detection capability, allows rapid, screening of GFP transfectant cells and is ideally suited for automatic, high throughput, 96-well microplate and multiple microcentrifuge tube analysis.
A spokeswoman for Guava Technologies told DrugResearcher.com: "The technology was launched to address the need to make traditional flow cytometry applications more accessible to the non-flow expert. The aspects of the system make the system accessible - with minimal training - up and running in less than half a day."
The spokeswoman added: "There are no bench top, easy to use systems on the market that also provide both 96-well and tube formats. The competition is really traditional flow cytometry."
Guava PCA systems are both expandable so new applications may be added in the future. The Guava EasyCyte system is available now and ranges in price from $75k (€62k) to $90k (€74K).