Labcyte's Access Dual-Robot system (DRS).
Labcyte’s Access Dual-Robot system (DRS).

Live from SLAS 2018

Labcyte has introduced the Access™ Dual-Robot System (DRS) and the Echo® 655T liquid handler. The Company developed this acoustic sample management system for high-throughput new drug screening with AstraZeneca, Brooks Life Sciences, and Titian Software.

Acoustic droplet ejection technology uses the energy of sound waves to move liquids at nanoliter resolution, according to Chris Grimley, vice president of marketing at Labcyte.

“This new solution for compound management allows for higher throughput with significantly less sample needed,” he told GEN during the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening's SLAS conference in San Diego. “It supports the movement away from screens that look at every compound in a library to doing smart screens on a subset of that library.”

Labcyte's Echo 655T Liquid Handler.
Labcyte’s Echo 655T Liquid Handler.

Randy Dyer, director of product marketing at Labcyte, noted that the product offering “marries the benefits of working with presorted sample tubes with the benefits of acoustic liquid handling.” He pointed out that the advantages of acoustic technology include the miniaturization of assays, no working with tube tips, and no sample contamination or carry over. 

The complete solution includes automated storage systems that allow for retrieval of new FluidX™ and AcoustiX™ sample tubes, supplied by Brooks Life Sciences. Racked tubes are then transferred to the Access DRS workstation where the Echo 655T liquid handler transfers samples directly from AcoustiX tubes into assay-ready plates for high-throughput screening applications. Orders for and results from samples processed on the system are managed by software developed by Titian Software.

Chris Grimley added that Labcyte also released at SLAS a regulatory-ready family of Echo acoustic liquid handlers intended for pharmaceutical companies and laboratories developing and running bioassays.

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