Custom diagnostic services can accelerate the development and manufacture of your diagnostic assays. In part two of our blog series, learn how you can benefit from solutions custom made for you.
Imagine you are designing your immunoassay or your molecular diagnostic assay. Almost everything is working well, but there is something that not quite right. Maybe the membrane is wrinkling too much. Maybe your nucleic acid amplification is not robust enough. Or you just want round bottoms instead of flat bottoms on your 96-well plate. Those are just some examples of problems that can be addressed with custom solutions.
Developing and manufacturing a diagnostic assay is very precise work, so you need all your components to work optimally. If one little thing is not right, it could affect the assay’s sensitivity, specificity, and/or usability. Buying materials and reagents off the shelf is economical and a great place to start, but sometimes you need something better.
Custom solutions are hard to describe because they aren’t solutions looking for a problem, they are answers to your specific problems. Cytiva can do what you need from tweaking the specifications of a particular product to fully developing a kit based on your idea. Some customization options are described below.
Custom membranes and pads
We can customize our broad range of catalog pads and membranes to suit most immunoassay requirements. Customization options include slitting, cutting, punching and a range of post treatment options. Our diagnostic specialists will work with you to develop the following components to your specific assay including:
- Cellulose and glass fiber media
- Nitrocellulose membranes
- Capillary pore membranes such as track-etched polycarbonate membranes and Anopore™ inorganic membranes
- Whatman™ 903 Proteinsaver cards
To make custom components, you will work closely with our team from concept to delivery, and you will continue to receive support even after you have your product in hand. A general workflow of the process is shown in Figure 1.
Fig 1. Key steps of the custom design process
The team has considerable experience and capabilities in the selection and customization of test components, as well as an understanding of the underlying science of rapid diagnostic test design. We can help with design robustness and work with different design formulations to minimize time and cost and optimize test conditions so they are repeatable at both small- and large-scale quantities.
Learn more about custom membranes and padsCustom biology
Membranes and pads are just the start of your customization options. If you’re working on a molecular assay, amplifying nucleic acids or expressing proteins are likely to be part of your test development. You want your assay to be easy for the end user to operate. Custom biology services can help streamline your assay by building exactly what is needed to detect your target molecule.
Custom biology services are possible for any of our protein and nucleic acid sample preparation, labeling, and detection kits as well as our magnetic beads. The Cytiva Diagnostic Services team can tailor the configurations, formulations, pack sizes and concentrations to your needs, while ensuring the same quality, performance, and reliability as our standard catalog products.
Examples of kits which we have customized:
- PCR-grade nucleotides
- CyDye™ fluorescent dyes
- PuReTaq™ DNA polymerase
- Thermo Sequenase™ DNA polymerase
- AutoScreen 96-well plates
With molecular biology reagents and tools made for your molecular diagnostic assay, you’ll enjoy optimized amplification, clean-up, and detection of nucleic acids and proteins.
Find out about our custom biology solutionsCustom plates
High-throughput assays often use multiwell plates and automation to process samples. We can customize 24-well, 96-well, and 384-well plates to streamline your sample collection, analysis, and purification of sequencing reactions. We will work with you to develop a complete custom product including dispensing, packaging, and labeling to provide you with a product that is customer ready. The plates are optimized for automated filling, allowing for greater efficiency. Many features can be customized including:
- Plate material
- Color
- Well bottom shape
- Media
- Surface coating
- Plate well configurations
For our filter plates, we apply our knowledge in membranes, resins, and mold tooling for development and production. Our proprietary process encapsulates the filter media minimizes contamination between wells. Our dedicated coating facilities are environmentally controlled, meeting strict quality standards. You have a lot of membrane and filter options for use in different applications.
- Glass microfiber: for cell harvesting and binding assays; liquid scintillation counting; or high-loading, DNA binding and purification
- Melt blown polypropylene: for prefiltration
- Cellulose acetate: for low protein binding and routine applications
- Polypropylene: for protein precipitation fast flow
- Polyethersulfone: for low protein binding and cell culture
- Polyvinylidene difluoride: for amino acid analysis and protein sequencing
Plates can be easily overlooked as simply the vessel that holds samples and reaction, but in a diagnostic assay, small changes can improve the sensitivity and accuracy of the tests. Customizing your plates can make your assay better and easier to use.
Learn more about custom platesExplore your customization options
Figuring out exactly what needs to be changed to improve your immunoassay or molecular diagnostic assay can be tricky. That’s when you can rely on the Cytiva Diagnostic Services team. We will work closely with you to pinpoint problems and then develop solutions that fit your exact needs. We will do the testing and provide you with prototypes for you to test, approve, or send back for more work.
To get an idea of how our solutions have helped developers like you, download our case-study eBooks. We have one on large-scale projects and one on small- to medium-sized projects. You can read about how we worked with each client and how they achieved success. Once these case studies have inspired you, reach out to the Diagnostic Services team and allow us to help you accelerate your diagnostic development.
Find out what Diagnostic services can do for youClick here to read part one of this blog series, which covers value-added diagnostic services. Then click here to read part three on knowledge sharing.