Low-Volume Dispenser for DMSO Back-filling used by Leading Biopharmaceutical Company

Redd&Whyte have announced its Preddator system has been integrated in an assay workcell by AstraZeneca, to meet a generic high throughput nano-litre dispensing application. Using the Preddator system, the assay run time has been significantly reduced, while maintaining the dispensing consistency and flexibility of the original workcell.

Scientists in the Oncology Group at AstraZeneca integrated the Preddator system as an additional dispensing module to complement a Labcyte ECHO 555 acoustic reformatter in a high throughput cell-based screening workcell. It uses the nano-litre dispensing platform across over 250 plates in 384-well format to DMSO backfill volumes ranging between 20 and 100nL over ~36 hrs per batch in each run. The main function of the Preddator system is to carry out the DMSO backfill step to maintain a constant level of DMSO across all assay wells.

John Vincent, Senior Research Scientist in Oncology at AstraZeneca commented: “It can take us around 36 hours to run an assay. We knew if we could speed up the workflow by having an efficient nano-litre dispenser to carry out the DMSO back-filling separately, we could improve the consistency of our compound dosing. This would make a significant saving of stock compounds as a result of requiring fewer stock plates and a shorter overall run time. The Preddator allows us to do this.”

Vincent continued: "We chose the Preddator system because it is able to dispense nano-litre volumes of different liquids and it has a small footprint which is a critical factor to fit into our bespoke automation workcell. The new workflow with the Preddator is allowing us to reduce our compound dosing step by up to 30%.”