Novel Stabilisation and Protection of Biological Materials at Room Temperatures

Presently, biological materials such as nucleic acids, proteins, cells, viruses and vaccines, are maintained and transported in a cold environment to preserve sample integrity. Employing a cold-freezing and cold-shipping approach can be very cumbersome, expensive and prone to failure through delays and damage during shipment.  This is especially so for samples collected in the field and in remote locations.

Stratech Scientific are pleased to offer a proprietary core technology (SampleMatrix®) from Biomatrica, which stabilises and protects biological materials at room temperature without degradation. The SampleMatrix technology was designed by combining extremophile biology that enables long-term survival of organisms in extremely dry environments, with synthetic chemistry.  SampleMatrix transfers the molecular principles of anhydrobiosis to a synthetic chemistry-based stabilisation mechanism.  A thermo-stable barrier is formed securely around nucleic acids to provide protection against degradation and loss of biological activity – effectively ‘shrink-wrapping’ the sample until it’s ready for use.

Building on the SampleMatrix technology Biomatrica have developed the ‘Gard’ and ‘Stable’ product ranges, which are designed to rapidly stabilise nucleic acids in cells, tissue, biopsy material, saliva, and blood samples. These products protect samples from degradation at room temperature, and fit directly into the point of care workflow.  This offers the ability to transport biological materials with increased quality therefore enabling forensics, biobanking, research and molecular diagnostics pre-analytics without the need for refrigeration.

Biomatrica’s RNAstable has already been used by Harvard University in a study to elucidate Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak (Science, 12th September 2014), demonstrating its value in current applications.

This technology has the potential to be applied to thousands of products in the biotechnology, diagnostic and pharmaceutical industries.

For further information visit http://ilmt.co/PL/3370.