Copan has announced the 30th placement of a Walk-Away Specimen Processor (Wasp), used for automatically planting and streaking bacteriology samples, at Eastern Health in Newfoundland, Canada.
So far, Wasp instruments have been installed throughout North America and Europe, including the US, Canada, Belgium, Italy, UK, Holland and France, among others.
Since its recent entrance in the field of automated specimen processing, the Wasp has been providing customers with an alternative for the everyday challenges of specimen processing in the microbiology laboratory.
Dr Paul Bourbeau, director of microbiology laboratories at the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania, home of the first beta site for the Wasp, said: 'The Wasp has been a great addition to our laboratory, allowing us to reduce labour while improving quality.
'Results obtained with the Wasp are more reproducible than results obtained by manual planting and produce far fewer labelling errors.
'The Wasp also facilitates the movement to liquid-based transport systems, such as the Copan Eswab, by standardising and automating the specimen planting process,' he added.
Dr Bart Gordts, medical director of the clinical biology laboratory at the Az Sint-Jan Medical Center in Bruges, Belgium, said that, in the past 10 years, his laboratory has invested heavily in automation, standardisation and the shift to a paperless system.
However, automation in microbiology had been a challenge and a solution was needed in the pre-analytical phase of microbiology.
'When we first saw the Wasp, we were very enthusiastic because we could immediately see that the automation and standardisation of the inoculation of microbiology samples was finally possible,' he said.
This was the last area in the laboratory that was still manual and susceptible to transcriptional and transposition errors, according to Gordts.
'In less than two months after acquiring the Wasp, we were able to introduce additional screening techniques that, without it, we would have been unable to accommodate,' he added.
Dr Giovanni Gesu, director of microbiology and virology at Hospital Niguarda in Milan, Italy, believes that the Wasp 'solves a major challenge in bacteriology and specimen reception'.
He added that, since implementing the Wasp, he has been able to free up his skilled staff from laborious specimen processing, thus retaining 14 laboratory technicians in molecular biology techniques and seven in serology, which has 'provided greater flexibility to rotate and deploy precious resources as demand dictates'.
