Hi all,
I am looking to see if anyone has a liquid handler that can handle 1 Dram (4mL) glass vials? Some things I’m looking for include: screwing/unscrewing individual vials, solubilization with DMSO, user friendly interface.
I’m in compound management at a mid-size biotech for context.
Looking forward to your suggestions!
We used Tecans for all our solubilization needs. Granted we didn’t use the Tecan for uncapping vials, but they do have that option if you want it. It can be quite slow, but it can be a walk-away machine.
We sourced our own racks for 4mL vials, Tecan will have strips that you can put 16 vials in I think? We had 8x12 racks made 4mL vials in both flat and tilted styles. The tilted racks allowed us to get almost all of the solubilized compound out of the vials. If the vials were sitting flat you leave upwards of 100uL in each vial, this wasn’t acceptable for us.
We also used both a Covaris for dissolution or just a simple hand vortexer. It gets old after awhile, but the Covaris was finicky. This was 15 years ago, so maybe there’s a better option now.
I’ve used Tecan’s decapping solution, and it worked well for our application.
You may want to look at the Sirius Automation MultiTaskerII or OmniTasker platforms
Hi @smartell we use the tecan Freedom evo to handle our one dram vials. Weighing, capping decapping, solubilizing etc. We actually made a little video for you: https://youtu.be/HY01NT7eTSs?si=vzCVDw9JQYFxHz0G
most vendors can work with 4 mL vials,
when you need functions like decapping, recapping, integration of dissolution (shakers, vortexers, sonicators) - the list of vendors get shorter
flexibility, user-friendly & able to scale based on workflow - a Tecan is a great choice, but would be somewhat bespoke with all the modules you need & would likely require your team to handle the integration parts/writing scripts etc
there are other, more dedicated systems designed for this - Zinsser, Sirius etc
it really depends on current & future needs to allow a small scale to increase, without the need for more CapEx & time to develop
SPT Labtech has the XL-100/200, which can also weight and label vials in addition to re-arraying them, decapping them, reading bottom barcodes, and there is a single-channel disposable-tip option for aspirate/dispense operations. These are all from a menu of configuration options, there may be heater/shaker options but I’m not aware of them (useful for solubilization workflows though, and you could probably integrate a bioshake or something if really needed. These can handle all kinds of tube/vial sizes (diameters), depending on the gripper and decapper choices, which is an advantage in a chemistry program where there might be a variety of sizes being used.
Scinomix has a tube/vial rearray and labeling system, which can cap/decap and as an option adds a single-channel cavro ADH pipettor for aspirate/dispense functionality. I think but am not certain that this one has capacitance liquid-detection and the XL-100 does not.
+1 for the slightly tilted rack design someone mentioned. If you care about dead volume, this approach helps a lot and 3D printing makes it easy. I machined some on a mill without a tilting spindle, and that was not fun.
