Page 38
www.us-tech.com
September, 2020
Fast-Tracking Diagnostic Testing for COVID-19
By Jeff Elliott P
VA TePla America was recently tasked with treating hundreds of thousands of plastic car- tridges, used by the customer for real-time
COVID-19 tests. Plasma treatments play a small but critical role by modifying the surface of the plastic multi-well cartridges used in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. Plasma is a state of matter, like a solid,
liquid or gas. When enough energy is added to a gas it becomes ionized. The collective proper- ties of these active ingredients can be controlled to clean, activate, chemically graft, and deposit a wide range of chemistries. Untreated synthetic polymers used to
make multi-well plates and cartridges are nat- urally hydrophobic and provide inadequate binding sites for cells to anchor effectively to their surfaces. To improve biomolecule attachments, sur-
vivability and proliferation, they must be mod- ified using plasma to become more hydrophilic.
Fast-Tracking Cartridge Treatment Plasma treatment can help to eliminate
air bubbles that accumulate at the edges of the well bottom, which can interfere with the prop- er reagents and also limit the available surface area.
With COVID-19, there is also the need to
detect the presence of the virus at its earliest stages, which means fewer diagnostic markers are available. A manufacturer of plasma equipment,
Cartridges used for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing.
PVA TePla also offers contract processing services. The company was already treating some of these medical cartridges, but the onset of the pandemic sharply increased the volume. “We were treating approximately 1,500 test
cartridge units for the customer, and now they were asking us to process more than 50,000 per
month,” says Michael Barden, head of research and development, PVA TePla. “Since each car- tridge had many wells, that equates to roughly 500,000 individual tests that could be conducted each month.” PVA TePla worked with the customer to opti-
mize the plasma processing time from an hour per batch to only 10 minutes. This significantly in- creased throughput. The company has devel- oped advanced plasma techniques for surface activation to create long-life, hydrophilic sur- faces that also prevent any problematic air bub- bles from forming, which can negate accurate testing results.
Plasma treatment can eliminate the air bubbles that accumulate at the edges of the wells, which interfere with the reagents and limit available surface area.
Although each batch could be processed
in less than five minutes, Barden says there were other ways to optimize the throughput. In the past, incoming parts were shipped with the components loose in bags. The drastic increase of quantities, sorting, preparing and counting added significantly to the time and costs of pro- cessing. In fact, PVA TePla’s staff had to han- dle each of the items by hand — not ideal.
Continued on next page
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92
