Over my career working in the field of lab instrumentation and medtech, I saw how quickly benchtop 3D printers grew from a novelty item into an indispensable prototyping tool in a company's product design workflow. Through not meant to replace traditional CNC machining or injection molding in high throughput precision manufacturing (at least not today), having a benchtop 3D printer where you sit (with good ventilation I hope) enables a quick method transform 3D visualization on the screen into a physical part that you can touch, feel and assemble. Even with less manufacturing tolerances, the benefits of having such accessible everyday tool means an industrial designer can:
shorten the design optimization cycle
avoid long turn-around booking/wait time on external or even internal machine shops
achieve higher confidence when finally making a very expensive injection mold
So you might be wondering, what does 3D printing has to do with life science R&D? Well, perhaps some of you are already harnessing the power of 3D Bioprinting as a new field in additive manufacturing. For those of you doing daily assay development, and screening protiens and antibodies, there is actually an analogy to be drawn here: you as a life scientist can simplify everyday R&D workflow with a portable SPR, especially in the area of assay optimization and troubleshooting. Having your own portable SPR on the bench means:
No longer you need to book time or wait for the run to fill on the shared SPR machine.
Save yourself at least a couple of weeks of turnaround time sending your samples out to centralized facilities.
Or, if you provide CRO services, you can offer fast SPR results to your customers anytime, while keeping it very affordable.
R&D scientists working with ELISA may spend up to 80% of their time troubleshooting. Though a gold standard assay, a failed ELISA result is only known at the end of a long 3-4 hour run. With pharma investing typically $300k on supporting a FTE scientist, this trial-and-error approach can easily translate into $1,000s in lost productivity and consumables cost in a single day. Not to mention that there is still no good way to determine the root cause of the failed step(s). With portable SPR, you can actually quickly gain insight into each preparation step. Label-free also means zero labelling influences on the observed interactions. In essence, portable SPR allows you to optimize and validate your surface chemistry preps before you start a long and expensive run, whether it be ELISA or on a complex high-throughput analytical instrumentation.
Intrigued? Contact us today to learn more about how Affinité portable SPR can revolutionize your assay development and drug discovery workflow. To show you how easy it can be, we will set up a demo portable SPR on your bench whenever you are ready. In the meantime, check out this 3-min video and on-dmeand webinar about what it means to have a portable SPR as your everyday R&D tool.
About Affinité Instruments
Based in Montreal, Canada, Affinité Instruments has made it its mission to offer portable, affordable and easy-to-use SPR to enable all life science researchers to have SPR as a tool for quick binding analysis, bioproduction quality control, biomarker identifiation, assay development and even in-vitro diagnostics. Check out our customer testimonials to see how we have democratized SPR all over the world as an everyday benchtop tool.