Scientists at Rejuveron Vascular Therapeutics, a company specialising in the development of therapies to tackle neurodegeneration, are using Integra's Viaflo 384 handheld electronic pipette to accelerate their research.
Combining this convenient benchtop system with endothelial cells cultured in Corning HTS Transwell 96 well plates allows the team to investigate the ability of drugs to penetrate the blood brain barrier (BBB). Vasco Ledebur de Antas de Campos, Head of Discovery Biology at Rejuveron Vascular Therapeutics, explained: “We deposit cells in the Transwells, and incubate them to form a monolayer on the filter membrane in each well. Once we have obtained high confluency – which simulates the BBB – we administer the drug candidates.
“We use a Viaflo 384 – with a 96 channel head and 125 µl Sterile Filter GripTips – to both deliver the drugs to the apical side and take samples from the basolateral side of the Transwells. This allows us to check the amount of each drug that was able to permeate the barrier. This approach would be difficult to perform with a standard multichannel pipette, as we are often screening large libraries. In contrast, it’s a simple task for the Viaflo 384, since you can easily program the system to aspirate from any part of the well.
“I love working with the pipette. The system is easy to set up and optimise and, in addition, it is very flexible. For example, you do not need to load the whole deck, but can use just a single column or row, which means that we can use the system to set up and study dose responses,” Vasco concluded.
