Pipetting Solutions for Accelerated COVID-19 Testing

Increased sample processing for paediatric hospital group 

Integra Biosciences’ VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipettes and EVOLVE manual pipettes are playing pivotal roles in COVID-19 testing at Children’s Minnesota, an award-winning, non-profit acute paediatric healthcare group in the ‘twin cities’ of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. These innovative tools have helped the group’s molecular laboratory to process more samples, more effectively in this unpredictable sociomedical period. 

Expanded in-house capacity to enable high-priority COVID-19 testing

The rise of the pandemic has forced the 16-strong laboratory team to restructure its workflows and expand its in-house capacity to enable high-priority COVID-19 testing. To help meet this challenge, the team invested in a number of six and 12 channel VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipettes - as well as single channel EVOLVE manual pipettes - using the increased availability of equipment and multichannel pipetting capabilities to rapidly expand their workload. These ergonomic pipettes have also helped to alleviate some of the wrist and hand pain associated with repetitive sample transfers, as some laboratory staff were starting to develop repetitive strain injury. 

Julie Laramie, Laboratory Technical Specialist at Children’s Minnesota, explained: “The Integra pipettes are well made and really user friendly. The VOYAGER’s adjustable spacing makes it very simple to pipette between racks of different standard formats, allowing us to seamlessly move from sample extraction to amplification to detection. This reduces the total number of transfer steps by moving multiple samples rapidly in parallel, substantially shortening processing times. It has also decreased the number of errors compared to using a single channel pipette, and we now almost exclusively use the VOYAGER and EVOLVE pipettes for COVID-19 testing.”