Automated liquid handling robot for rapid lateral flow assay development

Area of Science:

• Biotechnology
• Assay Development
• Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Background:

• Lateral flow assays (LFAs) are widely used in point-of-care diagnostics due to their cost-effectiveness and ease of use.
• Developing sensitive and specific LFAs is time-consuming and resource-intensive, often involving labor-intensive workflows.
• Existing development processes can be a bottleneck, delaying the availability of crucial diagnostic tests.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel automated robotic platform to accelerate and improve the lateral flow assay (LFA) development process.
• To reduce the cost, time, and labor associated with creating sensitive and specific LFAs.
• To enable high-throughput optimization of LFA parameters.

Main Methods:

• Development of an LFA-specific automated robotic liquid handling system with tailored hardware and software.
• Implementation of large-scale optimization experiments for variables like antibody pairs and reagent concentrations directly on LFAs.
• Validation of the platform using malaria, SARS-CoV-2, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis LFAs, comparing results to traditional ELISA-like methods.

Main Results:

• The robotic platform demonstrated significant improvements in assay development efficiency and quality.
• Minimized hands-on time and maximized experiment size, leading to enhanced reproducibility.
• Successful application in developing LFAs for diverse targets, including infectious diseases.

Conclusions:

• The automated robotic platform offers a flexible, rapid, and high-throughput solution for LFA development.
• This approach substantially improves the quality and quantity of assay development efforts.
• The system is validated and applicable to a range of diagnostic targets, streamlining point-of-care test creation.