ARI Launches New Assay Prep System for Drug Discovery

Art Robbins Instruments (ARI) has announced the launch of their Cobra 148 non-contact dispensers. These affordably-priced liquid handling systems were designed for use in a wide range of drug discovery applications and enable low-volume, non-contact reagent dispensing for assay assembly and plate preparation.

Rapid, reliable assembly of assay reagents is critical for biochemical and cell-based assay development, especially when low-volume assays are required.

The Cobra 148 systems finally provide assay developers with the freedom and flexibility to design assays using precious or costly reagents and cells without constraint, dispensing them at low volumes in a microplate format.

Scientists have complete control over the volume dispensed, and can set individual well dispense volumes to as low as 300 nanoliters, enabling complex concentration gradients and even sparse-matrix assay development strategies.

Researchers in drug discovery and other areas that require a large number of data points per assay are now also able to dispense a broad range of volumes of up to four reagents into 96-, 384- and 1536-well microplates.

With an option for on-the-fly dispensing, 300 nanoliters can be dispensed into an entire 384 well microplate in 14 seconds. Twenty-five microliters require only 39 seconds.

Aspiration and dispensing from microplates is a standard feature in the 1 and 4 channel models, virtually eliminating dead volumes and preserving precious reagents.

A dedicated 8-channel bulk dispensing system is available for very high throughput applications.

“Assembling microplate-based assays is a fundamental part of drug discovery and life science research, the instrumentation has to be fast, robust and fit seamlessly into user’s workflows” commented Art Robbins, founder of ARI.

Robbins continued, “We’ve applied our years of experience in developing non-contact dispensers for protein crystallography applications to the Cobra 148 systems so that researchers can take advantage of the same speed and reliability for their assay development and screening applications.”