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Cambridge, UK: TAP Biosystems, a leading supplier of innovative cell culture systems and consumables for life science applications today announced it is launching a new RAFT Kit on Booth #712 for the generation of 3D cell cultures in inserts at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) 2013 Conference. The flexible kit is designed for quick, easy generation of single or multiple 3D cell cultures using collagen, in a new format which expands the range of assays that can be run successfully with the RAFT technology.

The expanded assay capabilities include the ability to create robust co-cultures, barrier models and air-lifted cultures. These cultures can be used for transport, chemotaxis and invasion assays across a wide range of therapeutic areas and deliver a realistic collagen environment for the cells to increase the physiological relevance of the assays.

On the booth, TAP experts will show the new RAFT cell culture insert Kit, containing 48 individually packaged RAFT absorbers, which can be used with ThinCert™(Greiner Bio-One) or Millicell® (Millipore) 24-well cell culture inserts, together with RAFT reagents and the TAP Biosystems plate heater. TAP’s staff will also demonstrate how scientists can use the new RAFT Kit by simply mixing reagents from the RAFT reagent kit with their cells, pipetting into the cell culture inserts and incubating in the plate heater for 15 minutes to form a cell-seeded collagen hydrogel. After this, they will place the RAFT absorber onto the hydrogel, which in just 15 minutes will form a physiological strength cell-seeded collagen culture ready for use.

For researchers at SLAS2013 wanting to discover which organotypic models and phenotypic assays have been made using the RAFT technology, Dr Grant Cameron, TAP’s RAFT Development Director will be presenting data at a workshop entitled “A Novel, Rapid and Reproducible Method for Creating 3D Cell Cultures to Study Complex Cell Behaviour” on Monday, 14th January at 12:30-1:45pm in Sun Breakout rooms 5-6 on the Ballroom Level.

For scientists at SLAS2013 that would like to understand the scalability of RAFT 3D cell culture to meet their throughput requirements and find out how to automate this process for compound screening, on booth #701 TECAN is showing the automated RAFT capabilities of the Freedom EVO® liquid handling workstation to produce 3D cell cultures in 96-well plates. There is also a joint TECAN/TAP poster presentation (#TP 184) on automating 3D cell culture as part of the Assay Development and Screening track on Tuesday, 15th January, between 1-3 pm.

Dr Grant Cameron, TAP Biosystems’ RAFT Development Director stated: “3D cell culture offers benefits to so many application areas and using the RAFT collagen-based process, scientists can create a realistic cellular environment to study cells’ complex behaviour. This is why we’re delighted to introduce the RAFT cell culture insert Kit at SLAS2013, because it broadens the applicability of the RAFT portfolio as a method for generating realistic cell culture models.”

Cameron continued: “We look forward to welcoming scientists on Booth #712 and to discussing how RAFT’s simple three step process of mix, make and measure could allow them to easily integrate 3D cell culture into their cell-based chemical and drug screening programmes.”