Selected for US Army bioterrorism preparedness

Edited by the Laboratorytalk editorial team Oct 4, 2006

Franek Technologies, has been selected as the power protection source for the US Army's Automated Biological Agent Testing System (Abats) for biological weapon detection

Franek's comprehensive power solution protects the entire Abats project, including all automation and computers, from power fluctuations and failure.

In addition to assuring that the Abats project runs 24/7, Franek's LPS solution assures that generated results are true and compliant; the integrity and reliability of robotic operations are maintained; human interaction is minimised; and that the system meets the US Army's ROI goals.

"Our goal is to replicate Abats at key locations nationwide to decrease the burden on public health laboratories," explained Isaac Fruchey, automation laboratory manager, Abats project.

"Since each location will have differing power quality, we needed a power conditioning and battery back-up system that would normalise power input and protect our results.

"Franek Technologies offered this solution and its LPS is critical to the project's success".

Part of National Homeland Defense, the US Army's robotic, high-throughput system is able to rapidly analyse a large number of samples for possible biological contamination including air, food, soil, and mail.

The system will detect bio-threat agents by analysing real-time polymerase chain reactions (PCR) and immunoassay results for unknown environmental samples.

More accurate and consistent than previous detection methods, Abats will be able to analyze three times the samples with one third the staffing costs.

Abats represents the integration of laboratory-proven instrumentation systems from Applied Biosystems, Beckman-Coulter Sagian Operations, AB Gene, IGEN, and Franek Technologies.

This team of companies successfully developed the highly sophisticated laboratory automation system to increase speed of reportable results, increase throughput, decrease staffing time, and decrease biohazard risk.

"Together with the engineering teams at Beckman-Coulter and Applied Biosystems, we developed a comprehensive, automated detection system that is vitally important to our nation's bioterrorism preparedness," explained Paul Newman, VP of Engineering, Franek Technologies.

"We thrive on the opportunity to engineer economical and highly-effective power protection solutions for unique applications and Abats represents a huge success for us.".