Description

Cambridge, UK: TAP Biosystems, (now part of the Sartorius Stedim Biotech Group), a leading supplier of innovative cell culture and fermentation systems for life science applications, today announced a new NCI 60 application for its CompacT SelecT™, a system that automates cell culture and processing in T-flasks and microplates.  The details of the application, which will deliver a full NCI 60 panel within a working week, are available on Booth 1846 at the AACR.

On the booth, TAP Biosystems’ experts will explain how using an intelligently designed, simple, five-day workflow it is possible to maintain cancer cell line panels, such as the NCI 60, on a CompacT SelecT and also generate assay plates for each cell line during a working week, thus saving thousands of hours of manual cell culture processing tasks.

Pivotal to this workflow are the CompacT SelecT’s integrated cell counter and confluence measurement capabilities. The cell counter ensures seeding density is consistent and regularly scheduled confluence measurements reliably predict when cell lines will reach their ideal harvest conditions. This allows each flask, irrespective of cell line, to be processed so that flasks are harvested at optimal confluence. Depending on seeding density required for assay plates, harvesting a single T-175 flask could produce sufficient cells for five to ten 96-well plates, as well sufficient cells for seeding new daughter flasks to maintain the cell line.

By linking sequences of work including expansion, media exchanges and plating the system can be set up and run to ensure production of consistent NCI 60 cell line panels, without the need for error prone manual cell culture. This allows researchers constant access to high quality assay-ready cells for research, screening or profiling activities.

Dr Dave Thomas, Product Manager at TAP Biosystems explained: “Maintaining the NCI 60 cell line panel is a very time consuming task. However, because it can be cultured in a common basal media, the reagent requirements are minimal and as doubling times for the majority of the cell lines allow the majority to be passaged on either a three or four day schedule this enabled us to devise a simple five day workflow for culturing and maintaining the entire panel on a single CompacT SelecT.”

Thomas added: “We’re look forward to meeting scientists on Booth 1846 and discussing how this application of the CompacT SelecT could significantly reduce cell culture time and resource demands for researchers, as well as improve the consistency of cells they use in their oncology programmes.”