Labcyte Awarded U. S. Patent Describing the Acoustic Transfer of Droplets into Small Openings Moving liquids with Sound™

Labcyte Inc. has announced the issuance of U.S. Patent 7,405,395 which exploits the advantages of using sound to move liquids. This patent describes the acoustic transfer of fluid droplets into openings less than 300 microns in diameter.

Droplets of DMSO are ejected from a well of a microwell plate, through the eye of a needle and into a glass capillary with a 100-micron internal diameter. Each droplet has a volume of 2.5 nL.

“We have exquisite capabilities for directing a droplet exactly to where we want it,” said Chief Technical Officer, Richard Ellson. “We can easily direct a droplet of almost any liquid into an extremely small opening or lay it onto a complex surface such as a stent. We have been able to position droplets with better than 10 micron accuracy.”

“The Labcyte® acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) technology used in our Echo® Series 500 liquid handlers has quickly become the method of choice for sample transfer in high-throughput screening laboratories in the pharmaceutical industry. This latest patent shows how our acoustic technology can be used to load mass spectrometers or to fill shallow wells in a low-volume assay plate or even to place fluids into the recesses of stents and other medical devices.”

“We believe that the spatial precision covered by this patent plus the proven capabilities to move a wide variety of liquids robustly with extraordinary precision and accuracy is making the technology appropriate for many companies for a wide variety of applications beyond the current uses in drug discovery, genomics and proteomics.”