Jan 26, 2015 | By Alec
That 3D printing is currently slowly but certainly revolutionizing the medical world, is hardly a secret. Just look at all the promising, clever and at times even life-saving 3D printed solutions that are being unveiled (almost) every week. Just take a look at last week’s innovation to make curing bow legs easier than ever before.
But behind every doctor and behind every new medicine, there’s a whole team of laboratory scientists working around the clock to develop new solutions for our health problems. Fortunately, a new 3D printing/tablet solution will allow them to efficiently tackle one of the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks you can find in a laboratory: pipetting, or the transferring of substances from one location to the other.
It’s a very essential but tedious task that can often take hours every week, especially as its crucial to keep track of what sample goes where. While there are very expensive robotic solutions for this process, these are typically even slower than people and are accident-prone; so while they take the work out of your hands, the scientific progress itself is slowed down. Fortunately, a team of researchers from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (from MIT in Cambridge, Mass.) has come up with a remarkably simple solution that requires a tablet, a 3D printed adaptor and a pair of hands. And what’s more, they are offering it for free and open source to everyone who can benefit from it.
Their solution is called iPipet, and revolves around a setup that transforms your iPad (or any other decently sized tablet) into a smart bench that, as its defined, ‘guides the execution of complex pipetting protocols.’ It has been masterminded by Whitehead Fellow Yaniv Erlich, and will also be covered in a letter that will be published in the next edition of Nature Methods.
As Erlich explains, typical pipetting approaches are accident-prone, as they combine highly tedious tasks with a complex system of keeping track of all the data. ‘We needed an alternative to costly robots that would allow us to execute complex pipetting protocols. This is especially important when working with human samples that are often in limited supply.’
And this is how is iPipet solution works. In a nutshell, standard well plates (96 or 384 sizes) are placed on top of a tablet screen. The iPipet app running underneath them will guide users through the process of what goes where through a series of lights that follow a preprogrammed protocol. These protocols can easily and quickly be made in Excel files in a comma-separated format, uploaded to the free iPipet website which immediately generates the data for the app. For exact details on programming, check out this page here and this instructional video here.
So far, all tests with this clever set-up have proven to be absolutely successful, and can cut pipetting times in half (doing 3000 steps in just seven hours). There’s just one problem users have encountered, and that’s where 3D printing has come to the rescue: how do you ensure your well plates stay fixed in position? To do that, Erlich and his team have designed an open-source plastic adaptor that can be easily 3D printed on any FDM printer. You can find the full files for that cover here on Thingiverse.
In short, the iPipet system is a cost-effective solution for the most tedious tasks in any laboratory. And what’s more, it’s open-source nature means everyone is set to benefit from it. As Erlich stated, ‘We want to maximize the benefit for the community and allow them to further develop this new man-machine interface for biological experiments.’ It looks like 3D printing has a bigger role to play in the medical world than just cranking out prosthetics.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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