If there’s one thing the corona pandemic has taught us, it’s that laboratories place tremendous importance on high sample throughput rates. Even with highly qualified laboratory personnel, this demand can no longer be met. There’s no getting round the automation of laboratory processes. That’s why MolGen in the Netherlands has developed PurePrep TTR, which can prepare 320 patient samples per hour for molecular processing. And the Dutch company uses laboratory-specific automation technology from Festo.
Rapid growth
During the corona pandemic, laboratories were ramped up on a large scale because high sample throughput rates were absolutely essential. "This is where MolGen got involved, and in a very short time, within 2 to 3 years, we've grown from five to currently over 130 employees," explains Niels Kruize, CEO of MolGen and one of the three founders of the company, making reference to branch location in the Netherlands, as well as the UK and the USA.
“When we founded MolGen, our primary field of business was high rates of sample throughput in genetic engineering laboratories for animals and plants. We had a lot of knowledge about the chemicals that were needed for this,” explains Kruize.
Recent developments include the PurePrep TTR handling unit. It’s used for automated handling of liquids at high throughput rates by quickly, accurately and reliably transferring them from sample vials to microwell plates. “The automated PurePrep TTR has a throughput rate of 320 samples per hour,” says Kruize. Even laboratory assistants with good training and lots of professional experience are unable to match this tremendous throughput rate,” he adds.
Laboratory staff for more demanding tasks
Despite the expert skills of trained laboratory staff, errors can nevertheless occur which lead to contamination. The individual steps of grasping a sample, unscrewing the cap, putting the cap down, removing the liquid with a pipette and transferring it to a microwell plate are time-consuming and cumbersome. The sample vials and the plates are labelled with barcodes which are read by scanners in order to monitor and track the samples throughout the entire work process. “Automating these process steps makes it possible to deploy highly qualified laboratory personnel much more effectively for more demanding tasks, such as analyzing test results.”