Liquid Handling Platform Ideal for Automated High Throughput Cell Separation

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has automated high throughput cell separation protocols using aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) on a Freedom EVO® 200 liquid handling platform. PhD student Sarah Zimmermann explained: “ATPS offers many advantages compared to antibody-based methods of cell separation; cost-effectiveness, scalability and very mild, gentle conditions for purification of cell products. Initially, we performed ATPS manually, but this is tricky and can give rise to large errors and unreproducible data. Automation was the way forward.”

“The Freedom EVO workstation has enabled us to establish automated high throughput screening, allowing rapid, directed design of purification protocols for therapeutic cells. The process is more rapid and reproducible than manual methods, enabling 96 samples to be processed in four hours. Volumes between 10 and 990 µl are pipetted using the Liquid Handling Arm with fixed tips, with standard deviations ranging from 1.5% for the smallest volumes to less than 0.5% for larger volumes, even with very viscous polymer solutions. We can also accurately pipette small cell suspension volumes, reproducibly transferring 5 x 105 cells in a volume of 13 µl with a standard deviation of less than 3%. The automated process has been applied to the separation of differentiated and undifferentiated cells from the HL-60 cell line, achieving gentle, cost-effective and scalable purification of cell products without significantly influencing the cell viability.”