INTEGRA reports on how respiratory drug discovery and development specialists - Pulmocide Ltd. (London, UK) are using a VIAFLO Assist pipetting assistant to enhance the productivity and reproducibility of their screening of novel compounds in a range of biological assays.

Drawing upon its world-class drug discovery team - Pulmocide (www.pulmocide.com) is generating a pipeline of potent anti-infective agents for delivery by inhaled administration for the treatment of life threatening lower respiratory tract viral and fungal infections specifically RSV pneumonia and Invasive Aspergillosis.  The lung is the principle site of infection for RSV and Aspergillus – delivery of highly effective new treatments directly to the lung will allow rapid control of infection with minimal systemic toxicity. 

Lauren Anderson Dring, research scientist and project manager at Pulmocide commented “Our work involves medium throughput screening of novel compounds in a range of biological assays. This involves accurate drug dilutions which ultimately allow us to analysis each compound’s potency; thus aiding the rapid discovery of highly effective new treatments for respiratory tract infections". 

She added “The VIAFLO Assist has become an integral part of our compound screening process. It is used on a daily basis to produce reproducibly accurate drug dilutions in a medium throughput manner. It is particularly useful that a multitude of parameters can be pre-defined, such as volume and pipette mixing speed, thus allowing us to set up and save a variety of dilution protocols to suit our needs.  We are particularly impressed with the how user friendly the VIAFLO Assist is.  We have found the device to be intuitive to use thereby requiring minimal training. We are glad to have incorporated such a reliable and easy-to-use laboratory tool into our protocols".

Multichannel pipettes are a valuable tool for laboratories working with microplates. However, prolonged and repetitive pipetting sessions pose the risk of strain and fatigue, which can result in repetitive strain injuries (RSI) and less reproducible results. The VIAFLO ASSIST together with INTEGRA’s VIAFLO II electronic pipettes form the perfect partnership to prevent users from RSI and to significantly increase the reproducibility of prolonged pipetting protocols such as serial dilutions, plate filling and reagent addition. By mounting a VIAFLO II electronic pipette on the VIAFLO ASSIST, the pipette’s protocols can be carried out fully automatically.

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