A Promising Partnership for Biomarker Discovery

Scientists at CLIPP (Clinical Innovation Proteomic Platform) use two of Tecan’s Freedom EVO® platforms to automate sample preparation for a biomarker discovery project based at the Hospital and Cancer Centre in Dijon, France.

Dr Patrick Ducoroy leads CLIPP, and explained the role of automation in the project: “High sample numbers and throughput are of paramount importance to us in order to identify good, robust biomarkers for investigation. It is also vitally important to standardise procedures and treatment of samples and, in the early discovery phase, stringent quality control is a must. Quite simply, automation is essential to achieve all these objectives.”

“Our workstations are fully integrated with one another, maximising automation and standardisation of the sample preparation. A Freedom EVO 200 aliquots samples into 96-well microplates, then transfers these plates to a Freedom EVO 100 for protein and peptide purification, allowing us to process 96 patient samples for mass spectrometry in just one hour.

Ultimately we are aiming for a thousand samples a week, and Tecan’s technology will be central to us achieving this goal. We have had very good support from Tecan,
particularly in modifying the parameters of the workstations. I am sure this has helped us to achieve such excellent reproducibility of results, with the high throughput
that we need.”