Labcyte Awarded 1st Patent in China

Labcyte, whose Echo® liquid handling platforms move liquids with sound, has announced the grant of its first patent in China. Patent CN 101035681B describes how acoustic energy is used to assess the characteristics of any fluid in real time to optimise its transfer.

The Labcyte acoustic droplet ejection technology offers touchless transfer of a wide variety of liquids, with major benefits in life science applications including drug discovery, genomics, proteomics and diagnostics.

“The life sciences industry in China is the world’s highest growth market and the pharmaceutical and biotech markets are expected to be the 3rd largest market, after the USA and EU, in the world by 2013 at $73 billion,” said Sanger Chang, General Manager of Tekon Biotech, the Labcyte distributor in China. “Labcyte products have already been successfully adopted by some of the largest pharmaceutical and CRO companies in China as well as by all ten of the top ten pharmaceutical companies globally.”

“This new feature allows customers to transfer liquids for a wide range of applications including siRNA screening, qPCR, genotyping and total assay assembly for drug discovery,” said Rich Ellson, Labcyte CTO. “Customers have chosen Echo liquid handlers because they provide better precision and accuracy, reduce operating costs and eliminate cross-contamination.

“The technology described in the patent allows users to transfer many different fluids with factory-installed calibrations that require no user customisation. The built-in intelligence of the Echo platform automatically optimises fluid transfer well by well.”