RTS Secures Major Contract for Phase One of an Automated Blood Fractionation System

RTS LIFE Science has won a prestigious contract to design and install an automated robotic system incorporating machine vision for the new UK Biobank.

The contract follows the successful development of a prototype vision system (patent applied for) by the Company. The full fractionation system will be commissioned in the second quarter of 2006, by which time it will be fully integrated with the UK Biobank’s software and database. Once the first system is installed, the UK Biobank will commission further systems from RTS until it has achieved the required processing capacity that incorporates operational redundancy.

Tim Peakman, executive director at UK Biobank, commented: “The required throughput and quality and highly ramified data structure means that this process can only be done in a fully integrated and automated way. We have worked with RTS using modern manufacturing design principles to produce a robust automation platform that will meet the needs of the project in this critical process element”.

Hosted by Manchester University, the UK Biobank aims to build a major resource to support a diverse range of research that will improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness and promote health throughout society. The project will follow the health of 500,000 volunteers for up to 30 years, collecting information on environmental and lifestyle factors and linking these to medical records and biological samples. The samples will be stored so that they can be used for biochemical and genetic analysis in the future. UK Biobank is funded by the Department of Health, the Medical Research Council, the Scottish Executive and The Wellcome Trust.

Paul Downey, director of laboratory operations at the UK Biobank, explained: “No one has ever done anything like this before. We worked out that our research will require approximately 3,500 tubes of blood to be processed each day. As blood degrades, processing needs to be speedy. The only alternative to an automated system would be a manual one. Quite apart from the small army of technicians such an output would necessitate, there are also the serious health and safety aspects exposing people to unscreened human blood every day of their working lives. It soon became apparent that there was no machine that would do all that we required, so after consultation and a tendering process, we chose RTS Life Science, because they were the only company that had experience in automation driven by vision systems.”

When centrifuged at low speeds, blood separates into three layers or fractions: plasma, the buffy coat containing white blood cells, and the red blood cells. The RTS system centrifuges the collected blood in racks of individual vacutainers, identifies each sample, identifies the fractions and aliquots the chosen fraction into arrays of 96 1ml tubes. In addition, the system boasts rigorous QA and QC procedures.

Experienced in the sphere of machine vision, RTS developed a system especially for this project. A digital camera takes two images. Unique software then analyses these images and is able to determine the exact boundaries between the layers of centrifuged blood. These layers are then converted into liquid handling protocols and mapped to destination tubes before the robot aliquots the layers into arrays of 96 1ml tubes prior to storage or preparation for assay.

Adrian McQuillan, RTS’s project manager, commented: “The speed of aspiration is critical. Plasma is the fastest of the three, because it is less viscous, but we cannot risk disturbing the buffy coat, so our system parameters stop just short of it, ensuring that there is no layer mixing and no buffy coat is lost. Shear forces must also be considered for cellular fractions. Unlike other biobanks, the UK one will collect all the parts of the blood, as each part can reveal something different about a human’s health and more detailed assays are likely to be developed in the future.”

David Harding, business development manager at RTS, said: “Since the mapping of the human genome, extraction of DNA from blood has become ever more important to scientists. DNA is only contained within the white blood cells or buffy coat, so this layer is of great significance. While one of our systems can process between 100-300 vacutainers per hour, depending on the protocols used, a laboratory technician would require a day to process just 20 to the same quality and with the same level of data integrity. As experts in both robotic integration and machine vision, we are well placed to be at the forefront of this emerging market, which includes not only other biobanks, but also, DNA research, clinical trials and pharmacogenomics.”