Even the slightest devi­a­tions in human genetic mate­rial can be respon­sible for the onset of dis­ease – and in many cases, ther­a­pies can only be devel­oped if the genetic back­ground is known. It was a real sen­sa­tion when in 2003 the first human DNA was com­pletely decoded after more than 13 years of work, and costs amounting to hun­dreds of mil­lions of euros.

Nowa­days, the decoding of genetic mate­rial is com­mon­place in many lab­o­ra­to­ries and only takes a few hours. And while costs have also come down dra­mat­i­cally, a price of around 1,000 euros per analysis is not insignif­i­cant. Fur­ther­more, since genetic mate­rial reacts very sen­si­tively to external influ­ences such as tem­per­a­ture fluc­tu­a­tions, sat­is­fac­tory sample quality must be ensured before each sequencing.

Reli­able quality assurance

This is where Agilent’s credit card-sized Screen­Tape comes in, which promises rapid quality con­trol of DNA or RNA sam­ples. “The Screen­Tape works according to the prin­ciple of elec­trophoresis, in which nucleic acid strands are sep­a­rated from each other. Nor­mally this is a very time-con­suming pro­ce­dure,” explains Jan Eick­hoff, Man­u­fac­turing Engi­neer at Agi­lent Technologies.

Each Screen­Tape has 16 lanes – enabling the analysis of 16 dif­ferent sam­ples. The cor­re­sponding ana­lyt­ical instru­ment auto­mat­i­cally places the sample on one of the lanes and then, depending on the field of appli­ca­tion, ana­lyzes var­ious para­me­ters such as quan­tity and purity. The results are avail­able after about one minute. Thus, it can be deter­mined even before the time-con­suming and expen­sive sequencing run whether the ­genetic mate­rial is suit­able for fur­ther evaluations.

“Harro Höfliger has proven to be a re­liable partner who does not give up until the machine is run­ning smoothly.“Jan Eick­hoff, Man­u­fac­turing Engi­neer at Agi­lent Technologies

Pre­cise lamination

Since pro­duc­tion first began, Harro Höfliger has been pro­viding one of the tech­nolo­gies used by Agi­lent to man­u­fac­ture the Screen­Tapes. After devel­oping a punching machine and a line for pack­aging the tapes into four-side sealed pouches, the third joint project, the “Trinity”, is about to go into operation.

The machine devel­oped by Harro Höfliger pre­cisely joins the two main com­po­nents of the Screen­Tape, which con­sist of film mate­rial: The Printed Layer with its imprinted elec­trode con­nec­tions and the ther­mo­formed Process Layer. The two layers are lam­i­nated in three sta­tions run­ning in parallel.

Before and after lam­i­na­tion, var­ious camera sys­tems check for the pres­ence of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or scratches on the sen­si­tive film mate­rial; a rather impor­tant aspect because the sam­ples are opti­cally eval­u­ated in the analyzer.

Guar­an­teed process reliability

Since the product is made of sophis­ti­cated film mate­rial and can only be sealed within a narrow tem­per­a­ture window, the Harro Höfliger Engi­neering & Inno­va­tion Ser­vices spe­cial­ists have set up and thor­oughly tested the “Trinity” lam­i­na­tion unit in advance. “This is how we were able to make sure that the process works in prin­ciple. In addi­tion, it enabled us to make joint deci­sions about the con­trol tech­nology involved and develop para­me­ters for the sub­se­quent machine,” explains Jan Eick­hoff. Another impor­tant aspect of quality assur­ance is the data­base link of the “Trinity”: All process and batch data is ­dig­i­tally recorded, making it pos­sible to trace the cre­ation of each indi­vidual tape down to the last detail.

Jan Eick­hoff is con­vinced that the fields of appli­ca­tion for sequencing processes – and thus the market for the Screen­Tape – will con­tinue to grow. “Among other things, this tech­nology will open the door to per­son­al­ized med­i­cine, where ­deci­sions on what helps patients are made on a case-by-case basis.”

 

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Photos: shutterstock/Blackboard, Agi­lent Tech­nolo­gies, Helmar Lünig