Tecan offers HP Direct Digital Dispensing to drug discovery biologists

The HP D300 Digital Dispenser is a simple, standalone instrument designed specifically for drug titration studies in the pharmaceutical and academic sectors. It provides fast and reliable dispensing from 13 pl to 10 μl, improving reproducibility and productivity to accelerate the drug discovery workflow.

Advances in liquid handling technologies are enabling smaller and smaller volumes to be reliably dispensed, and this has had an impact on the types of assays that can be performed. One area where this has been especially evident is in drug discovery, which typically requires the generation of dose response curves from extremely limited sample volumes to compare one compound to another. Historically, these dose response curves had to be created using serial dilutions, as transfer volumes were limited to the microliter range. HP D300 Digital Dispenser has been developed specifically to address this issue, rapidly delivering picoliter to microliter volumes of drug compounds in DMSO for the creation of high quality dose response curves.

Based on HP’s proven and robust inkjet technology, Direct Digital Dispensing offers reliable dispensing across a broad dynamic range – from 13 pl to 10 μl – using non-contact dispensing and disposable cassettes to virtually eliminate the risk of cross-contamination and carry-over. This avoids the need for slow, error-prone and wasteful serial dilutions in most studies, allowing a complete dose response curve to be generated from a single, concentrated stock solution of the candidate compound. Combined with optional shaking during dispensing and the ability to dispense any dose to any well, this offers greater flexibility in assay design.

The flexibility and low reagent usage of the HP D300 allow ‘data rich’ investigations, such as drug-drug interactions, to be performed earlier in the drug development workflow, in an effort to reduce the number of candidate compounds that fail in the downstream phases. The very low volumes of DMSO introduced to each well potentially eliminate the need for DMSO normalization for many investigations and, for those studies where DMSO normalization is essential, a larger capacity D4 Dispensehead Cassette is available for DMSO backfill. This new cassette has a fill capacity of up to 200 µl, and can be interchanged with the current T8 Cassette to meet individual assay requirements, offering both time and cost savings for a wide range of experiments.

The instrument’s software is specifically designed to give drug discovery biologists the power to develop and run their own experiments, allowing easy set up of the most appropriate experiment, rather than the one that is easiest for an automated script or handheld pipette. It allows users to create or change plate layouts in minutes, with straightforward plate randomization/de-randomization – to minimise systematic effects across the assay plate – and the ability to dispense an unlimited number of plates, mixing and matching microplate formats within the same protocol. This ensures walk up convenience, ready-to-run performance and flexible experimental design to increase research productivity, reliability of results and the speed of drug discovery workflows

Join the Webinar on the 6th November: Drug-drug combinations made simple.

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