INTEGRA Biosciences’ liquid handling solutions and pipette automation software are helping 3T Biosciences – a biotech company based in South San Francisco, California – to enhance the reproducibility and productivity of its pipetting workflows, accelerating the discovery of novel cancer targets and therapeutics.
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Patients diagnosed with solid cancers or autoimmune diseases often have limited and ineffective treatment options. Understanding how the immune system recognises, targets and destroys cancer cells is crucial for developing alternative treatments for these challenging conditions. 3T Biosciences was founded in 2017 as a spin-out from Stanford University and specialises in developing T-cell engaging bispecific antibodies that target novel peptide-HLA targets. The company’s proprietary 3T-TRACE platform technology takes advantage of diverse target libraries and machine-learning algorithms to identify and validate novel T-cell receptors and targets from patient immune responses. This enables detection of the most prevalent immunogenic targets in solid tumours that can be targeted therapeutically.
The company employs a range of handheld pipettes from INTEGRA Biosciences for precise manual and semi-automated liquid handling, and has more recently adopted an ASSIST PLUS pipetting robot with a D-ONE single channel pipetting module to automate protein distribution during normalisation and aliquoting. The combination of the ASSIST PLUS and user-friendly VIALAB pipette automation software enables the 3T Biosciences team to simplify protocol creation and easily generate worklists without extensive programming knowledge.
Jake Kleiner, associate scientist at 3T Biosciences, has been leading efforts to integrate automation into the lab’s diverse workflows. Kleiner said: “The ASSIST PLUS and VIALAB allow us to achieve advanced lab automation, which has improved our efficiency and scientific outcomes. The user-friendly graphical interface and straightforward programming enable non-experts to quickly and easily set up and run their own complex workflows.”
Looking ahead, 3T Biosciences plans to integrate automation into more liquid handling processes. Jake continued: “We’re now looking at using INTEGRA’s solutions to increase our high throughput screening capacity, optimise workflows for more complex biological assays and enable the development of additional standardised protocols for therapeutic discovery.”