The flowbot® ONE series – PART 3: the user

In this series we like to highlight the flowbot® ONE. We will tell you more about the system that makes liquid handling easy and speak to the developer and users of the flowbot® ONE. In this episode we will talk to Evert van Zanten from Certe, user of the flowbot® ONE. It all started for Certe during the COVID period, but soon a world of possibilities opened with the acquisition of the flowbot® ONE.

Expanding capacity with the flowbot® ONE

Certe is an organization for integrated medical diagnostics and advice for primary and secondary healthcare. Evert van Zanten, former development analyst molecular biology and currently responsible for the functional management at the division Medical Microbiology of Certe in Groningen: “Certe is a laboratory that provides high-quality medical diagnostics and derived products and services for healthcare providers and their patients in the northern provinces of the Netherlands. We offer a wide range of tests and diagnostics; medical microbiological, immunological as well as clinical chemical and haematological. Hospitals, doctors and general practitioners, midwives and hundreds of thousands of people have been relying on our care for many years.

Like a lot of other laboratories worldwide, Certe encountered a sharp increase of additional work during the COVID-19 period. “During the pandemic, COVID-19 diagnostics at our location in Groningen ramped up to 1500 to 1800 samples per day. Due to the overwhelming number of COVID-19 diagnostics, other diagnostics were in danger of being delayed. We wanted to scale up to a more automated platform to be able to perform all the COVID-19 diagnostics and create room for the other diagnostics”, Evert explains.

Available, inexpensive, and fully programmable

The flowbot® ONE turned out to be the solution to Certe's problem. Evert: “Pipetting robots were not easily available in the beginning of the COVID-19 period. The ones that were available, were very difficult to adjust by yourself. Through the grapevine we heard about LabHelp and the flowbot® ONE. A pipetting robot that was not that expensive and fully adjustable by the user. Those were the three things we were looking for: available, inexpensive, and fully programmable!”

Was Certe able to find other uses for the flowbot® ONE when the COVID-19 diagnostics were declining? “The flowbot® ONE is a very flexible system. Now, we also use it for flu season. It helps us, among other things, to determine influenza A and B. We also incorporated a DNA extraction workflow, by combining the flowbot® ONE with the EchoLUTION Viral RNA/DNA Swab kit plus (BioEcho), which is based on a centrifuge spin-plate system for which setup can be performed on a pipetting robot system. We were able to bring these two together due to the flexibility of the flowbot® ONE. This combination allows us to speed up RNA extraction”, Evert tells. 

Not only the flowbot® ONE system is flexible. The associated software also offers a lot of possibilities for the customer. Evert: “We also use the LabHelp middleware. This helps us to analyse and forward the diagnostics to our Laboratory Information System (LIS). The LabHelp middleware is the connecting link between the flowbot® ONE, PCR equipment and our laboratory system.”

LabHelp and the flowbot® ONE opened a world of possibilities

There is always room for improvement. That is why the flowbot® ONE and the software are always evolving. Flow Robotics, the company who developed the flowbot® ONE, and LabHelp are both innovative companies. We both put the customer first and think in possibilities. That is why we share our findings and feedback from customers and always strive to improve the customer experience.

Things can always be done differently, but it is mostly small technical things. For example, the flowbot® ONE has a relatively small container to catch pipette tips. Most pipetting robots have a shoot to the outside where you can put a large container. This is of course a design choice, but we did talk about it with Jeroen Poodt from LabHelp. We always have very good constructive conversations with each other. We only have good experiences with LabHelp. They are always available, open to points of improvement and they are always thinking along in solutions for the problems we experience in our lab or things we encounter with the flowbot® ONE”, Evert says contentedly.

 “The flowbot® ONE is a relatively inexpensive and very flexible platform. It is a good purchase for a laboratory to robotize laboratory diagnostics and pipetting operations. Due to its flexibility, it is very versatile. At Certe we are very positive about the flowbot® ONE system. It helped us during a period when we had to process a lot of COVID-19 diagnostics, Labhelp in collaboration with the flowbot® ONE made that possible for us!”, Evert concludes.

Are you interested and do you want to discover what the flowbot® ONE can do for your laboratory? Contact us for more information or a demonstration.

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LabHelp Robotics B.V.

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5531 PZ BLADEL


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