INTEGRA Biosciences’ VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipettes and EVOLVE manual pipettes are playing pivotal roles in COVID-19 testing at Children’s Minnesota, an award-winning, non-profit acute pediatric healthcare group in the ‘twin cities’ of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. These innovative tools have helped the group’s molecular laboratory to process more samples, more effectively in this unpredictable sociomedical period.

The rise of the pandemic has forced the 16-strong laboratory team to restructure its workflows and expand its in-house capacity to enable high-priority COVID-19 testing. To help meet this challenge, the team invested in a number of six and 12 channel VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipettes – as well as single channel EVOLVE manual pipettes – using the increased availability of equipment and multichannel pipetting capabilities to rapidly expand their workload. These ergonomic pipettes have also helped to alleviate some of the wrist and hand pain associated with repetitive sample transfers, as some laboratory staff were starting to develop repetitive strain injury.

Julie Laramie, Laboratory Technical Specialist at Children’s Minnesota, explained: “The INTEGRA pipettes are well made and really user friendly. The VOYAGER’s adjustable spacing makes it very simple to pipette between racks of different standard formats, allowing us to seamlessly move from sample extraction to amplification to detection. This reduces the total number of transfer steps by moving multiple samples rapidly in parallel, substantially shortening processing times. It has also decreased the number of errors compared to using a single channel pipette, and we now almost exclusively use the VOYAGER and EVOLVE pipettes for COVID-19 testing.”

About INTEGRA Biosciences

INTEGRA Biosciences is a leading provider of high-quality laboratory tools and consumables for liquid handling and media preparation. The company is committed to creating innovative solutions which fulfil the needs of its customers in research, diagnostics and quality control within the life sciences markets and medical sector. Today, INTEGRA innovative laboratory products are widely used all around the world. More than 100 distribution partners form a worldwide sales network providing responsive and competent services to customers. These distribution partners are supported by a highly motivated and experienced team of specialists at the company headquarters in Zizers, Switzerland and Hudson, NH, USA. INTEGRA is an ISO 9001 certified company.

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