Liquid handling with Andrew: New Product Award@SLAS2013.

A pipette is a common high-tech biology tool used in both industry and research. After 50 years of development and daily use by hundreds of thousands of users, pipettes are the de-facto liquid handling standard, with performances strictly regulated by the international standard ISO8655. Their flexibility and performances have no equal. However, the continuously increasing complexity of liquid handling, and the resulting fatigue due to repetitive manual actions, put a strain on the accurate execution of protocols. The results are unavoidably affected. Experiments soon become very time-consuming, and long pipetting activity can induce severe musculoskeletal disorders - especially for those lab users exceeding two hours per day at the bench. Experiments need repetition not only because the underlying biology is often difficult to reproduce, but because every user has different training and habits, or simply because it is hard to repeat a complex liquid handling process without flaws.

Andrew is a novel type of pipetting robot that operates, unattended, adjustable manual pipettes in the same way as would the best skilled user. Ultimately, Andrew improves the reproducibility of data, while saving precious time in liquid handling and avoiding possible health issues. It weights 10 kg only, and with a footprint smaller than a sheet of paper it is also the first portable liquid handler in the world. It is easy to integrate in the lab: it can be put on an existing bench, under a hood, in a laminar flow box or even inside a refrigerator. And it can  execute liquid handling protocols designed with Andrew Assistant, a free protocol design software also useful for manual pipetting. This software allows anybody to define a liquid handling protocol in a breeze and without errors, all the while automatically calculating all the concentrations at any protocol step, and allowing serial dilutions in few clicks. The Andrew system is the new, cost-effective solution that improves experiments’ quality and lab efficiency - without even requiring any changes to liquid handling protocols, processes and consumables.