ABS’ mission is to make your research faster, easier, and more reliable. In a previous blog, I described how we work with you to speed your research. This blog discusses what easier means to us and how working with ABS does make your research easier. At first glance easier may seem to be a rather vague advertising catch all, easier than what? For us, it is much more specific. Working with ABS should be easier than doing it yourself or working with any other organization. Two examples illustrate how this works.
Suppose you need a large quantity of “ready to use” cells for a screening campaign. You could:
- Review growth protocol.
- Plan ahead for the time needed for the culture and freeze.
- Order reagents and supplies required for the entire growth project.
- Acquire cell vials from either in-house inventory, commercial vendor, or custom transfected a parental cell line.
- Thaw vial for project initiation.
- Do cell count and measure viability.
- Monitor cell growth and sterility of cells while in culture. Typical batches can take 2- 4 weeks for reach desired cell number.
- Expand flasks multiple times, which includes re-feedings along with cell count and viability checks.
- Harvest all flasks in one lot.
- Do cell count and measure viability.
- Centrifuge cells.
- Quickly, re-suspend cells in freeze media.
- Quickly aliquot vials, to ensure limited time in DMSO prior to freezing.
- Place vials in a slow freezing device over-night.
- Place vials in LN2 storage after the slow freeze.
- Do a QC vial thaw
- Check sterility, count, viability for post thaw vial.
- Check for Mycoplasma contamination
- Prepare any additional testing, such as cell line ID and viral panels.
- Generate reports on the above and maintain in a secure database.
- Store banked reserve samples in secure LN2 cryotanks.
Similarly, suppose you needs 500 FFPE blocks of tumor samples with matching blood samples. You could:
- Make sure that you have necessary agreements in place with a network of hospitals and vendors.
- Make sure that their consent forms are in compliance with your legal, ethical, and scientific requirements.
- Audit the sites to ensure that their processes actually are in compliance.
- Verify that the quality of the samples from each site meets agreed upon quality standards, such as RNA Integrity values.
- Track the shipping and receiving from each site.
- Barcode and label each sample, if needed.
- Match pathology reports or other donor information with the samples.
- Deal with any tracking discrepancies.
- Find replacement sample if any of these samples are not satisfactory.
Or
You could contact ABS with over thirty years’ experience doing all of the above and much more. Trained professionals, who are focused on these tasks, will assist you and keep you informed. All solutions are designed with you to meet your specifications, and we guarantee our work.
Even if you are not personally doing any of the above tasks, someone or more likely groups of individuals in your organization are dealing with these and similar tasks. These essential tasks enable discovery, but they divert valuable resources from your core mission. ABS is an extension of your laboratory. We do the necessary work that helps you accomplish the work of discovery.
Our next blog will discuss the tangible actions that we take to work to make our work more reliable.
