Automated Pipetting for Streamlined SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Testing

Integra Biosciences’ pipetting solutions are being used by renegade.bio to address the urgent need of diagnostic testing for COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. The company carries out huge numbers of SARS-CoV-2 assays each day, and has chosen Integra’s automated adjustable electronic pipettes and pipetting robots to perform PCR assays faster and more cost-effectively, while retaining high degrees of sensitivity and specificity.

Renegade.bio is a public-benefit corporation, and was founded in March 2020 to make SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing more accessible to the wider population, supporting health equity goals. When setting up its workflow, the company chose to combine a decentralised approach to sample collection with automation of repetitive liquid handling tasks with Integra pipetting solutions, reducing their costs while greatly increasing productivity and still turning around assay results in as little as 12 hours.

Dr Gabriel Paulino, Co-founder and Vice President of Product Development and Innovation at renegade.bio, commented: “The ASSIST PLUS pipetting robot equipped with a VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipette is one of our main automation platforms. This has really helped us to increase our throughput, as the VOYAGER is the only solution that can automatically adjust the distance between the individual tips, allowing us to move samples between our different sample tubes and plates easily. We also use the VIAFLO 96 handheld electronic pipette for assay set-up, as it’s really useful to be able to pipette reagents into every well of a microplate at the same time.”

“We love the user interface of the Integra products. It’s so easy to program the pipettes, and these intuitive tools have made the whole assay process incredibly streamlined. All the pipetting is now automated, which helps to reduce human error and fatigue, and allows us to work around the clock at our maximum capacity of around 2000 tests a day. Integra was definitely the right solution for us, and we’ve recently invested in a MINI 96 portable electronic pipette to further streamline our workflows.”

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