"Solutions for the miniaturisation and automation of cell-based assays are in growing demand within pharmaceutical and biotech companies. With our ultra low level liquid handling system sciFLEXARRAYER we enable scientists to handle single cells or low numbers of cells," said Holger Eickhoff, CEO of Scienion.
The sciFLEXARRAYER allows researchers to perform multiple cell-based assays in nanoliter drops, thereby increasing assay speed and reducing costs significantly.
The technology is a non-contact liquid handling and spotting system, which can dispense volumes of liquid within a pico- to microlitre range. Its non-contact dispensing ensures that the transfer volume is not affected by the substrate.
In addition, it can aspirate and dispense aqueous and organic solutions as well as living cells configured for a broad range of substrates.
This includes glass slides, MTPs, MALDI-MS sample plates, chambered glass slides, membranes includes a low-volume ultrasonically actuated wash station and a high resolution optical drop control system is built on a stage system enabling both industrial batch production and research.
Typical applications, which the sciFLEXARRAYER is suited to, include generating DNA, peptide or protein microarrays, MALDI-MS sample preparation and conditioning, eg. by recrystallisation in a tiny aliquot or organic solvent.
In drug research, the technology can be used for performing accurate dilution series or adding of tiny aliquots of enzyme, inhibitor of drugs, microarrays of experiments, e.g. for the optimisation of reaction conditions or screening assays.
Using the sciFLEXARRAYER, the Laboratoire Biopuces in Grenoble, France, developed a "DropChip" cell array on a glass slide for DNA and siRNA transfection combined with drug screening (Schaack et al., NanoBiotechnology, Volume 1, 2005, 183-189).
"Using the sciFLEXARRAYER, less than 100 cells per assay can be tested, a nano-amount of drugs can be tested and single-cell phenotypes can be analysed after contact with nucleic acids or chemicals," said Dr. Béatrice Schaack from Laboratoire Biopuces at the CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission).