The Impact of COVID-19 on PCR Liquid Handling Procedures

The transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus overwhelmed almost the entire medical and scientific community from its initial onset. Within just a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic put the global healthcare infrastructure under enormous pressure, with every entity stretched to full capacity. For most laboratories, the focus shifted quickly to developing polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic techniques to curb the virus's spread.

Rapid Development of COVID-19 Liquid Handling Techniques

Lab directors had to respond immediately and make decisions quickly to speed up the development of new PCR liquid handling workflows to deal with increased demand. Once public labs could no longer handle the quantities, regulators granted emergency use orders allowing private labs to develop additional diagnostic capacities using primers from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Overcoming Shortages with Experienced Liquid Handling Resources

One of the first challenges was getting the resources and supplies required for the new assays—everything from finding technicians experienced in pipetting to ordering consumables and reagents put laboratories under additional pressure.

Many labs had to develop private collaboration networks to accommodate the sheer volume of sampling required. Sharing supplies, ideas, or technologies quickly became the norm. Labs experienced in handling large volumes of PCR tests shared their techniques with those who had manually performed these procedures for a better transposition of scale. Supervisors and managers also had to contend with the challenges of keeping staff safe and samples free of contamination by following all the latest guidelines from regulators.

Using Technology for New Liquid Handling Workflows

Many directors had to look toward new laboratory technologies to overcome the shortage of experienced liquid handling resources. Optimizing the use of available space and limiting social interactions while performing large quantities of assays also required creative thinking.

Lab technologists needed to use and validate new instruments and preparation processes while also developing automated workflows to increase sampling capacity. Automation of liquid handling and pipetting tasks, sample preparation, and PCR analysis enabled labs to ramp up assay quantities without compromising accuracy.

A Complete COVID-19 Sampling Solution from Gilson

In this unprecedented time, dependency on automated liquid handling systems that require minimal supervision while ensuring repeatable and verifiable results will become standard. Solutions like the PIPETMAX® provide efficient processing for large quantities of assays, making it the ultimate laboratory assistant.

Suitable for many applications, such as qPCR and cell-based assays, the PIPETMAX requires a small footprint and comes with pre-developed, validated protocols. To improve your liquid handling efficiency and ensure consistent accuracy, you can customize PIPETMAX to support any assay format.

In addition to automated liquid handling, our experts can help provide you with a suite of devices to facilitate most steps in COVID-19 workflows. Whether performing qPCR or RT-LAMP tests, Gilson can guide you through your COVID-19 testing workflows to assist with sample transport, RNA extraction, sample tracking, guided pipetting, and of course, automation. Our COVID-19 testing workflows illustrate many of our products and highlight where they can be used.

What does the future hold?

When it comes to liquid handling solutions, Gilson is a trusted partner for public health and private labs worldwide.

As medical labs move from researching antibodies to tracking the efficacy of vaccines developed for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, having an efficient pipetting workflow in place will be essential. Our team has the expertise and dedicated technical support to quickly and efficiently get your new workflow in place.

While experienced human resources are irreplaceable, enabling your team of laboratory technicians with automated liquid handling systems can help overcome some of the current challenges we face.