Design & Production Teams Develop High-Tech Electrophoresis Machines

International product design and development company, IDC (Industrial Design Consultancy), is delighted to announce that it has helped produce one of the life science sector’s most technologically advanced capillary electrophoresis instruments. Working for deltaDOT, IDC designed, tested and manufactured, deltaDOT’s High Performance Capillary Electrophoresis (HPCE) instrument.

deltaDOT’s technology offers an extremely powerful analytical solution for the detection, separation, quantitation and analysis of proteins, nucleic acids, viruses, bacteria, chemicals and a wide range of other analytes. It uses deltaDOT’s superior and proprietary Label Free Intrinsic Imaging (LFII®) technology which means that expensive and complex molecular labels do not have to be used, which is often the case with conventional Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) instruments.

Originally a technology spin-out from Imperial College, deltaDOT had cutting-edge technology at its fingertips, but was keen for IDC to value engineer the product to ensure that its instruments delivered user appeal and high performance that could be achieved in the most cost-effective way. IDC’s engineering team was able to further optimise the electronics and mechanical components within the system, to achieve better results and deliver dramatic savings. In addition, IDC helped design and implement an innovative new cooling system that allowed the temperature of the test vials to be controlled to within ±0.5oC. This augmentation allows for the collection of experimental data that is highly repeatable. Following successful initial trials, IDC also prepared a full technical file to support the rigorous testing required for CE approval and ultimately the product launch.

The deltaDOT instrument (HPCE512) produces results of much higher quality in terms of repeatability, quantitation and resolution compared to the traditional CE approach. As a result the HPCE512 is able to outperform not only other CE instruments but it can also produce data of comparable or better quality to that produced using other popular analytical techniques such as High Performance Liquid Chromatography but at a lower cost. It can also produce satisfactory data on many types of samples that are sent for analysis using very expensive techniques such as mass spectrometry, thereby potentially offering significant cost savings to users. Following IDC’s reengineering of the product and the integration of active temperature control, the performance of the system has been further enhanced.

Ryan Fenton, IDC’s project manager, explains, “We’re delighted our team was able to make such an impact on deltaDOT’s product. This has been a multi-dimension project, using a full range of IDC's resources; from industrial designers and engineers, right through to production and testing services. We have been able to deliver extensive cost-savings at the same time as improving performance and the machine’s appearance. Our production team is currently assembling a batch of 10 machines, each with over 900 parts. Following in-house calibration and commissioning, these machines will be shipped to laboratories all over the world to accelerate R&D across a range of applications.”