RTS Life Sciences to Produce Robotic Blood System

RTS Life Sciences (Manchester, UK) has won a contract to design and install an automated robotic system incorporating machine vision for the new UK Biobank (Cheadle, UK).

The contract follows the development of a prototype vision system by the company. The full fractionation system will be commissioned in the second quarter of 2006, by which time it will be fully integrated with Biobank's software and database.

The UK Biobank aims to build a major resource to support research that will improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of illness and promote health throughout society. The project will follow the health of 500,000 volunteers for up to 30 years, collecting information on environment and lifestyle factors, and linking these to medical records and biologic samples.

Paul Downey, director of laboratory operations at the UK Biobank, explained that the research would require approximately 3,500 samples of blood to be processed each day. In addition to the large number of technicians this output would require, there are the serious health aspects of exposing people to such large amounts of unscreened blood.

When blood is centrifuged at low speeds, it separates into three fractions: plasma, the buffy coat containing the white blood cells, and erythrocytes. The RTS system centrifuges the blood into individual containers, identifies each sample, identifies the fractions, and aliquots the chosen fraction into arrays of 96 x1 ml tubes. A digital camera takes two images and software analyzes the images to determine the exact boundaries between the layers. The layers are then converted into liquid handling protocols and mapped to destination tubes before the robot aliquots the layers into tubes prior to storage or preparation for assays.

The UK Biobank will collect and store all fractions of blood as each fraction can reveal something different about an individual's health, and because more detailed assays will be developed in the future.



Related Links:
RTS Life Sciences
UK Biobank