RTS’ Cell Culture Platform – Tissue Culture Automation

RTS LIFE Science is a company with a proud history of successfully automating difficult to automate procedures for the life science sector. Now it announces the development of a modular system that automates the tissue culture process; a process that is vital to the development of immortalised cell lines.

Dr. Sean Sales, applications consultant at RTS Life Science, explained: “Like our other systems, the Cell Culture Platform features dynamic scheduling, courtesy of our SPRINT software. Our complete solution bears the hallmarks of our engineering integration and cell culture expertise, so it can be easily tailored for altered method configuration. Crucially, we have also designed it to be easy to expand and able to manage higher throughputs and even to ultimately become a large scale, flask cell culturing system.”

Bristol University commissioned a forerunner of the Cell Culture Platform three years ago primarily for its work on The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Since then RTS has further refined the system so it enables small-scale cell culture in micro titre plates. There are numerous applications for a system with the broad capabilities of the Cell Culture Platform, including, drug transporter assays, cell transfection and cell line expansion.

Following the success of its first system, Bristol University installed a second system, this time for the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study, which is managed by St. Georges Hospital, London and The Institute of Child Health, with the growth of cell lines being outsourced to the Bristol University team.

Despite being such a new addition to the RTS product line, already one commercial sale of the Cell Culture Platform has been made to a major US pharmaceutical company.