Applications in discovery research, regenerative medicine and bioprocessing

CAMBRIDGE, England–Mar 4, 2009 – The Automation Partnership (TAP), a leading supplier of innovative automation for life science research and production, today announced that this week marks 20 years since the installation of its first automated cell culture system.

In 1989, following in-house design and development, TAP installed four Cellmates to automate vaccine manufacture in roller bottles. Instead of transferring the process into large bio-reactors, a technically difficult and time-consuming development, TAP chose to automate the bench-scale process. The resulting system delivered the required rate and consistency of processing for commercial production.

Over 80 Cellmates have since been installed across a range of cell culture applications in manufacturing and research, including Amgen and Novartis Animal Health.

Today TAP’s automated cell culture range has expanded as scientists faced new bottlenecks and now includes systems with applications in discovery research, regenerative medicine and bioprocessing. These range from fully integrated systems such as SelecT, CompacT SelecT and Sonata to smaller bench top products such as Fill-It, Capit-All and CellCelector.

To mark the occasion a year of celebrations is planned, commencing with a customer party at the forthcoming SBS conference in Lille, France (26-30 April).