BioTek has been awarded U.S. Patent 8,858,718, covering the use of ultrasonic devices to check for clogged manifold tubes and to clean the manifold tubes of a microplate washer automatically.
The two features are known as Verify™ and Ultrasonic Advantage™ and are available in BioTek’s 405 family of microplate washers. Using Verify technology on the 405 washer, the user can run an automated routine to check for blockages, typically caused by protein or salt build-up in the aspirate and dispense tubes of the 405’s manifold. Verify uses ultrasonic pulses to determine that the volume dispensed or aspirated per tube meets...
BioSilta Ltd, a developer of advanced, reagent-based microbial growth systems, today announced that it has completed the set-up of operational and commercial headquarters in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, UK.
In addition, the Company has strengthened its Board and senior management team with appointments as follows: Mark Bloomfield appointed Chairman. Mark has over 20 years of global management experience and has held executive positions in life science companies such as DAKO, Applied Biosystems, Thermo Electron and Agilent Technologies. He has a proven track record in leading commercially-successful, multi-national teams as well as...
Non-contact dispensing technologies such as acoustics will evolve into popular platforms for liquid handling, finds Frost & Sullivan
The escalating need for high throughput data is accelerating the shift towards automation in the Western European liquid handling market. Government investments in the development of bioclusters as well as research and development centres for various drug discovery applications are opening up opportunities for liquid handling companies in the region. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Western European Liquid Handling Market, finds that the...
The project is led by a consortium of three institutions based in Lyon, France: Imaxio, the VirPath laboratory at the Université Claude Bernard of Lyon and the International Center for Infectiology Research (CIRI)
The funding will accelerate the pre-clinical development of a candidate influenza vaccine with the aim of starting Phase I trials by 2017. Imaxio, a biopharmaceutical company specialized in vaccines, today announces that it has been awarded funding of EUR 600,000 (USD 772,000) by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR) for the OPTIVAC project 'leveraging On t-cell immune resPonse To Improve influenza VACcines'. The aim of the OPTIVAC project is to improve the efficacy of vaccines for seasonal influenza and current pandemics. To achieve this...
PIE Scientific, a leader in low pressure high efficiency plasma source manufacturing, has recently released a revolutionary downstream plasma cleaner---SEMI-KLEEN plasma cleaner.
It is designed to meet the toughest contamination requirements from the semiconductor capital equipment industry. The revolutionary low plasma potential discharge technique greatly reduces the risk of ion sputtering damage. Together with a proprietary two-stage filter gas delivery system, SEMI-KLEEN plasma cleaner has been proven capable of meeting particle contamination requirement for sub 10nm nodes....
New awards to recognise excellence in UK Laboratories
GAMBICA and British Laboratory Managers Association patrons of UK Laboratory Excellence Awards
Awards Night scheduled for London, June 2015
Scientists and lab managers working in the UK’s laboratory sector will have a chance to gain recognition for their achievements in a new awards programme announced today. The UK Laboratory Excellence awards will open for entry on November 24th with 16 awards up for grabs including Laboratory of the Year and Laboratory Scientist of the Year. Tim Collins, Director, Laboratory Technology for GAMBICA said, ‘These new awards will shine a light on the central role that the laboratory plays in both the economy and the society as a whole....
Once again, as hospitals around the world are implementing Ebola preparedness protocols to deal with the outbreak safely and efficiently, the use of hydrogen peroxide vapour (HPV) for the decontamination of Ebola-exposed environments appears to be the preferred method.
A good example is Emory Healthcare, the largest healthcare system in Georgia, USA, which has set up an Ebola website to share its procedures and protocols. The protocols reference HPV several times among other important steps of care. Bioquell’s 35% HPV system has already successfully been used in the USA, UK, France and the Netherlands for the disinfection of rooms or...
By Cindy Neeley, PhD., Field Applications Scientist, Labware & Speciality Plastics at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Since their introduction in the 80s, three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures have been employed by tissue engineers, cell biologists, and cancer and stem cell scientists, mostly at university research laboratories. The continuous development of materials and cell culture methodologies has enabled the establishment of cell culture conditions that more closely reproduce the environment found in vivo. The first 3D culture methods were cumbersome, time-consuming....
Read MoreNov 10, 2014
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has announced that a partnership led by the Medical Research Council (MRC) will invest over £230 million in a range of revolutionary technologies aimed at identifying the causes of diseases such as cancer and dementia, and dramatically speeding up diagnosis and treatment.
The state-of-the-art technologies will be used to find out how differences in the cellular and molecular make-up of people affect how they respond to diseases and to treatment. The Clinical Research Infrastructure Initiative will bring together funding from UK Government, devolved administrations, Arthritis Research UK, British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, to advance clinical research in 23 key projects at centres across the...
University of Leicester academic leads study into effects of cediranib drug in chemotherapy treatment of cervical cancer
In Europe only 20-30% of patients with recurrent or secondary cervical cancer have tumour shrinkage after conventional chemotherapy and life expectancy is usually less than one year. Study funded by Cancer Research UK shows adding investigational agent cediranib to standard chemotherapy might be beneficial for patients with metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer. In Europe patients with recurrent or secondary cancer have a...
High Throughput Screening for Raman chemical analyzers
HORIBA Scientific, a leading innovator in the manufacture of high performance scientific and analytical equipment, is announcing the release of its new MultiWell module for the acclaimed LabSpec 6 Spectroscopy Suite. The module transforms the HORIBA portfolio of Raman microscopes into efficient high throughput chemical analyzers, coupling the non-destructive chemically rich analysis with high sample turn around and fast return on...
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...
The Matrix Gemini LIMS from Autoscribe meets the requirements of highly regulated laboratories by providing audit trails, time and date stamping of all actions and version control of all reference data, such as test definitions.
This helps with compliance to any guidelines that require change control, validation and audit trailing of changes to stored data. Examples include cGLPs and cGMPs and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 in pharmaceutical companies, NELAC and ISO 17025 in water and food testing laboratories or NAMAS / UKAS regulations. With Matrix Gemini in use in a wide range of industries and applications, experts from Autoscribe are available to discuss in...
Bigneat will now be supporting users of its laboratory automation enclosures and ductless fume hoods with a newly formed team to concentrate on all North American customers.
Bigneat is a world leading manufacturer of hoods and enclosures that provide user and process protection during experimentation and laboratory research procedures. Following a period of growth in demand for its equipment, with a significant increase in the number of users and a wide geographic distribution of installations across North America, Bigneat realized the need to open its first US office to support these customers directly. The Bigneat North American operation brings...
JPK Instruments reports on the use of their AFM system, the NanoWizard®, in the Nanobiosciences Group of the Institute of Physical & Theoretical Chemistry at the Technical University of Braunschweig.
It is being used to study DNA and DNA nanostructures. Dr Philip Tinnefeld is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at the Technische Universität Braunschweig where he runs a laboratory which specialises in the field of NanoBioScience. His group has pioneered the integration of DNA origami with optical single-molecule spectroscopy over the last few years. In this context, they have demonstrated some of the early applications where the breakthroughs of...
Cleaning techniques and their efficacy against pathogens such as VRE, MERS and SARS are just some of the hot topics infection control professionals have been discussing at this year’s Infection Prevention Conference.
Right at the heart of these talks is hydrogen peroxide vapour (HPV) technology and best practices. Bioquell’s Senior Microbiologist, Jon Otter, has presented, along with two of his peers, a study which shows the capacity of pathogens like influenza, MERS and SARS to survive for days on dry surfaces. These can then be transferred from surfaces to hands. Facing this challenge they recommend that healthcare workers need to...
Optimized kit for use with Gyros immunoassay platform
Gyros AB, a leader in utilization of microfluidic technologies to miniaturize and automate immunoassays, today announced the launch of its Gyrolab™ Protein A Kit for use on Gyrolab xP workstation. During purification of biotherapeutics, Protein A can leach from the chromatography support and co-elute with the therapeutic antibody product. The contamination complicates subsequent analysis using immunoassays....
Anasys Instruments reports on the new AFM-IR results from the Energy Research Group at NIST just published in the journal for Advanced Optical Materials. The paper is entitled “Nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy of plasmonic modes with the PTIR technique.”
Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) and the University of Maryland have used photothermal induced resonance (PTIR) to characterize individual plasmonic nanomaterials in order to obtain absorption maps and the first examples of absorption spectra with nanometer-scale resolution. Nanostructuring of plasmonic materials enables engineering of their resonant optical response and creates new opportunities for applications that benefit from...
Improved imaging tools to better understand the brain
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced its first research grants through President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative, including three awards to the University of California, Berkeley, totaling nearly $7.5 million over three years. In addition, a $12 million public-private collaboration between ZEISS and UC Berkeley to support the Berkeley Brain Microscopy Innovation Center (BrainMIC) was made public. The US Brain initiative is focused on advancing tool development in...
Researchers from Cardiff and Swansea Universities have been awarded a grant of more than £323k to develop a new, non-invasive, low-cost, and easy to use point of care device to diagnose Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV).
HCMV, a member of the herpes family of viruses, can have serious health consequences for those with weak immune systems, and a “devastating impact” on pregnant women and their babies if infected. The grant is a prestigious Product Development Award under the National Institute for Health Research Invention for Innovation (NIHR i4i) scheme to Dr Vincent Teng of Swansea University’s College of Engineering, Dr Richard Stanton of the Institute of Infection and Immunity at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, and the Wales Specialist Virology Centre...
Oxford Gene Technology (OGT), The Molecular Genetics Company, has launched its CytoSure™ Medical Research Exome Array at the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG)
Developed with leading molecular genetics experts at Emory University, the new array is highly targeted and exon-focussed, enabling the accurate detection of medical research relevant microdeletions and microduplications. The high-density array (1x1M) contains over 4,600 hand-curated genes, which have been grouped into disease- and syndrome-specific panels. This research-validated gene content can also be customised for...
Thermo Fisher Scientific has developed an efficient high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method with fluorescence detection for sensitive and rapid determination of benzo[a]pyrene in meat products.
This method uses on-line solid-phase extraction (SPE) for sample preparation instead of the commonly used off-line SPE method. Application Note 1093: Determination of Benzo(a)pyrene in Sausage and Preserved Ham demonstrates that this approach reduces costs associated with the SPE cartridge, labor, time, and reagents; and results are more consistent because the cleanup step is performed by automated on-line SPE rather than...
The two features are known as Verify™ and Ultrasonic Advantage™ and are available in BioTek’s 405 family of microplate washers. Using Verify technology on the 405 washer, the user can run an automated routine to check for blockages, typically caused by protein or salt build-up in the aspirate and dispense tubes of the 405’s manifold. Verify uses ultrasonic pulses to determine that the volume dispensed or aspirated per tube meets...
In addition, the Company has strengthened its Board and senior management team with appointments as follows: Mark Bloomfield appointed Chairman. Mark has over 20 years of global management experience and has held executive positions in life science companies such as DAKO, Applied Biosystems, Thermo Electron and Agilent Technologies. He has a proven track record in leading commercially-successful, multi-national teams as well as...
The escalating need for high throughput data is accelerating the shift towards automation in the Western European liquid handling market. Government investments in the development of bioclusters as well as research and development centres for various drug discovery applications are opening up opportunities for liquid handling companies in the region. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Western European Liquid Handling Market, finds that the...
It is designed to meet the toughest contamination requirements from the semiconductor capital equipment industry. The revolutionary low plasma potential discharge technique greatly reduces the risk of ion sputtering damage. Together with a proprietary two-stage filter gas delivery system, SEMI-KLEEN plasma cleaner has been proven capable of meeting particle contamination requirement for sub 10nm nodes....
A good example is Emory Healthcare, the largest healthcare system in Georgia, USA, which has set up an Ebola website to share its procedures and protocols. The protocols reference HPV several times among other important steps of care. Bioquell’s 35% HPV system has already successfully been used in the USA, UK, France and the Netherlands for the disinfection of rooms or...
Since their introduction in the 80s, three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures have been employed by tissue engineers, cell biologists, and cancer and stem cell scientists, mostly at university research laboratories. The continuous development of materials and cell culture methodologies has enabled the establishment of cell culture conditions that more closely reproduce the environment found in vivo. The first 3D culture methods were cumbersome, time-consuming....
The state-of-the-art technologies will be used to find out how differences in the cellular and molecular make-up of people affect how they respond to diseases and to treatment. The Clinical Research Infrastructure Initiative will bring together funding from UK Government, devolved administrations, Arthritis Research UK, British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, to advance clinical research in 23 key projects at centres across the...
In Europe only 20-30% of patients with recurrent or secondary cervical cancer have tumour shrinkage after conventional chemotherapy and life expectancy is usually less than one year. Study funded by Cancer Research UK shows adding investigational agent cediranib to standard chemotherapy might be beneficial for patients with metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer. In Europe patients with recurrent or secondary cancer have a...
HORIBA Scientific, a leading innovator in the manufacture of high performance scientific and analytical equipment, is announcing the release of its new MultiWell module for the acclaimed LabSpec 6 Spectroscopy Suite. The module transforms the HORIBA portfolio of Raman microscopes into efficient high throughput chemical analyzers, coupling the non-destructive chemically rich analysis with high sample turn around and fast return on...
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...
This helps with compliance to any guidelines that require change control, validation and audit trailing of changes to stored data. Examples include cGLPs and cGMPs and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 in pharmaceutical companies, NELAC and ISO 17025 in water and food testing laboratories or NAMAS / UKAS regulations. With Matrix Gemini in use in a wide range of industries and applications, experts from Autoscribe are available to discuss in...
Bigneat is a world leading manufacturer of hoods and enclosures that provide user and process protection during experimentation and laboratory research procedures. Following a period of growth in demand for its equipment, with a significant increase in the number of users and a wide geographic distribution of installations across North America, Bigneat realized the need to open its first US office to support these customers directly. The Bigneat North American operation brings...
It is being used to study DNA and DNA nanostructures. Dr Philip Tinnefeld is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at the Technische Universität Braunschweig where he runs a laboratory which specialises in the field of NanoBioScience. His group has pioneered the integration of DNA origami with optical single-molecule spectroscopy over the last few years. In this context, they have demonstrated some of the early applications where the breakthroughs of...
Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) and the University of Maryland have used photothermal induced resonance (PTIR) to characterize individual plasmonic nanomaterials in order to obtain absorption maps and the first examples of absorption spectra with nanometer-scale resolution. Nanostructuring of plasmonic materials enables engineering of their resonant optical response and creates new opportunities for applications that benefit from...
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced its first research grants through President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative, including three awards to the University of California, Berkeley, totaling nearly $7.5 million over three years. In addition, a $12 million public-private collaboration between ZEISS and UC Berkeley to support the Berkeley Brain Microscopy Innovation Center (BrainMIC) was made public. The US Brain initiative is focused on advancing tool development in...
HCMV, a member of the herpes family of viruses, can have serious health consequences for those with weak immune systems, and a “devastating impact” on pregnant women and their babies if infected. The grant is a prestigious Product Development Award under the National Institute for Health Research Invention for Innovation (NIHR i4i) scheme to Dr Vincent Teng of Swansea University’s College of Engineering, Dr Richard Stanton of the Institute of Infection and Immunity at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, and the Wales Specialist Virology Centre...
Developed with leading molecular genetics experts at Emory University, the new array is highly targeted and exon-focussed, enabling the accurate detection of medical research relevant microdeletions and microduplications. The high-density array (1x1M) contains over 4,600 hand-curated genes, which have been grouped into disease- and syndrome-specific panels. This research-validated gene content can also be customised for...
This method uses on-line solid-phase extraction (SPE) for sample preparation instead of the commonly used off-line SPE method. Application Note 1093: Determination of Benzo(a)pyrene in Sausage and Preserved Ham demonstrates that this approach reduces costs associated with the SPE cartridge, labor, time, and reagents; and results are more consistent because the cleanup step is performed by automated on-line SPE rather than...