Protocol reduces vaccine testing time

Ace Biosciences, a Danish vaccine developer, is using a Protocol automated colony counter to speed up potency testing of its pneumococcal vaccines.

The Protocol system is being used in pre-clinical trials to count the numbers of surviving Streptococcus pneumoniae colonies plated on modified Todd-Hewitt agar plates, post-Opka (in vitro opsonophagocytic-killing assay).

This has saved researchers at Ace hours of repetitive counting and has eliminated errors that can occur when enumerating many colonies and manually keying in results.

Dr Tim Schmitter, an immunologist at Ace Biosciences, said: 'We have to count around 70-120 colonies per sample and we have 288 samples in each run to assess all the serotypes of each pneumococcal vaccine.

'Counting 20-30,000 colonies was taking myself and another scientist six hours using a heavy semi-automated counting pen.

'Then we also had to type the results into Excel.

'Since we installed the Protocol last year, in just one hour, one scientist can complete two days of counts.

'This is not easy because colonies are sometimes the size of a pinhead and are close together, yet the Protocol does this with ease to provide highly reproducible data.

'The best thing is the results are automatically transferred into Excel, which allows us to perform statistical analysis straight away.

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