Two SelecT Systems for Automated Cell Culture Installed at World's Premier Bioresource Centre.

CAMBRIDGE, England -- The Automation Partnership (TAP), a world leading manufacturer of innovative automation for life science applications, is pleased to announce two of its SelecT(TM) automated systems for cell culture have been sited at the world's largest biological resource centre, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC(R)).

SelecT, an innovative automated system for unattended culturing of multiple cell-lines and assay-ready plate generation is already being used by more than 30 pharma and biotech companies internationally. The SelecT systems will be utilised at the ATCC to increase cell culturing productivity of over one thousand different mammalian cell lines.

Each SelecT system at the ATCC has the capacity to culture many cell lines in parallel without risk of cross contamination. The specially developed, negative pressure, laminar airflow processing area is optimised to ensure aseptic processing of each individual cell line according to its specific requirements. The system uses barcodes to record all the processing steps performed on each cell line and individual flask to verify that the right cells are delivered to the right place at the right time.

John Tyson, Chief Operations Officer of the ATCC, commented: "We reviewed three automated cell culture systems and chose to install SelecT as it offered the closest fit in helping achieve our goal of improving quality and delivery time. We were also impressed by the fact that SelecT was developed with major pharma companies, many of whom are our customers, which means the system was engineered and supported by people who understand the automation, as well as the science."

"We believe using SelecT systems for our cell culture production will make our turnaround on orders more rapid, and will allow us to continue to deliver high quality cell lines at competitive prices," added Tyson.

Dr. Tim Ward, Cell Culture Business Unit Director at TAP, concluded: "We are delighted to see our SelecT systems being used at such a prestigious cell culture facility as the ATCC. This is the largest investment in production equipment the ATCC has ever made and their confidence in the system being robust enough to handle the throughput and demands of generating top quality cells for timely delivery to labs all over the world, confirms SelecT as an international gold standard for automated cell culture."