Männedorf, Switzerland – IBBL (Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg) has developed the world’s first fully automated technique for the isolation of viable peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) using a Freedom EVO® workstation. Dr Fay Betsou, Chief of Biospecimen Science, explained: “PBMCs are of increasing interest for vaccine development and validation, and we have seen a steady increase in requests for PBMC-based functional assays. These cells – primarily lymphocytes and monocytes – are traditionally extracted manually using a laborious and time-consuming Ficoll-Paque method, taking a technician approximately four hours to isolate PBMCs from 10 samples.”

Taking advantage of the advanced liquid handling capabilities of the Freedom EVO platform, IBBL has developed a straightforward automated protocol based on the use of standardized citrate anticoagulant tubes (BD Vacutainer® CPT™). This walkaway process allows efficient isolation of PBMCs for cryopreservation while minimizing the number of granulocytes present in the final preparation. Fay continued: “This validated1 protocol is based on the mean hematocrit of the general population, and offers recovery rates and viability comparable to the manual process. This protocol can now be implemented as part of our standard portfolio of automated methods and, although high throughput is not our primary focus, the Freedom EVO system offers walkaway processing of 24 patient samples in under three hours, allowing the technician to perform other activities while it is running.”

1Hamot et al. Method Validation for Automated Isolation of Viable Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells. Biopres Biobank, 2015, In press.