RTS Life Science Unveils Revolutionary Automated Blood Fractionation System to US Market at ISBER 2008

RTS Life Science, a worldwide supplier of automated sample management and drug delivery testing systems, today announces that it will be unveiling its revolutionary Automated Blood Fractionation (ABF) system to the US market for the first time at ISBER 2008,18-21 May, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. This unique patent-pending* high throughput blood fractionation system is used to extract buffy coat (white blood cells) from whole blood samples.

The innovative, upgradable system provides a fully automated solution to blood fractionation and processing. The ABF system is a self-contained unit capable of processing up to 500 samples per day, providing substantial time and labour cost savings compared with manual fractionation. In addition, this new automated system from RTS Life Science provides the benefits of cost and labour saving, removal of human error, increased reproducibility and facilitation of sample tracking and auditing.

The revolutionary ABF system incorporates unique Vision System technology which measures the height of each fraction and calculates the volume of each layer following fractionation via centrifugation. The ABF solution also offers significant health and safety benefits by reducing employee exposure to unscreened blood and a LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) interface ensures ease of acquisition and manipulation of data.

Kristian Spreckley, Blood Fractionation Product Manager at RTS Life Science comments, “The key benefits to fractioning blood for biobanking are assay range and choice. Techniques such as proteomics, metabolomics and DNA analysis, where assays are always being developed, require efficient isolation of specific blood components. Fractioning the blood provides you the best possible opportunity to undertake all future analyses and essentially covers all of the bases. In addition there is the financial impact in that blood fractionation is hugely beneficial when building up potential DNA archives. Fractioning a sample enables the buffy coat to be stored for future DNA extraction which means a lower preliminary investment and negates the need to extract from samples, up to 90% of which may never be used. Our new ABF system has been developed in response to the unique needs of the biobanking industry and should be installed to automate blood fractionation and buffy coat retrieval from whole blood in any high volume environment.”

As well as the fully Automated Blood Fractionation System, RTS also offers this solution as a semi-automated system. To be among the first to see this innovative new offering from RTS Life Science please visit ISBER 2008, 18-21 May, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

*Patent Application Number 0422358.2