Technology firm cures vial label headache

By Richard Tyler Published: 9:40PM GMT twenty February 2010

A identical unfolding faced Kevin Auton, head of blurb operation growth at Cambridge Design Partnership, when he asked his customer, antibody retailer Abcam, how he could help. He perceived a startling answer: "Just as a interruption criticism I pronounced if you had a sorcery wand what would you do? And they pronounced if we could only compromise this complaint with labelling the tubes . . ."

It wasn"t what he approaching as the tip priority for a �300m blurb operation that is the world"s heading retailer of little vials containing any one of 57,000 opposite antibodies that are used by scientists to investigate new drugs.

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But whilst Abcam"s materials and processes are at the slicing corner of the tellurian curative industry, the labelling of the 500,000 vials it produces each year was far from 21st century. Like all the rivals, it had to tag the vials by hand.

"There were dual people in each of their offices around the universe whose pursuit it was to put labels on the tubes," says Auton. With so majority opposite sorts of antibody, each one value around �400, each vial has to be marked down accurately. The labels additionally have to ward off solidified at up to -190 C and be practical to vials that were already frozen.

But you do it manually additionally valid a poignant bottleneck inside of Abcam"s prolongation lines.

So Cambridge Design Partnership, a record consultancy, pronounced it would try to come up with an programmed solution. Because of the cost of the plan and the high risk of failure, the dual companies concluded to a 50/50 growth deal. It additionally meant that if successful, the span would share any deduction from commercialising the technology. "If they were carrying these problems everybody else was," says Auton.

One of Cambridge"s designers got to work and found an ultra-thin element that could be since identical qualities to an old-style, fold-away fasten measure. This meant it could take content and a barcode and be practical automatically but would not burden up Abcam"s existent programmed red blood vessel storage and retrieval systems. Within a year a antecedent device was assembled to print, request and stand in check that the labels were trustworthy to the right tubes.

The efficiency-saving valid significant. Each one of the 500,000 labels took fifteen seconds to routine by hand; the appurtenance right afar does it in dual to 3 seconds.

Auton says Abcam is completing the last hearing and the span have filed a obvious on their innovation. "The intensity to yield a labelling resolution for obvious samples in the NHS is huge," he says, indicating to investigate in the US that showed that errors labelling red blood samples had led to 160,000 "adverse events" fundamentally patients reception the wrong treatment.

"This is really a box where we compromise one complaint in one area and it opens the doorway to a total range of alternative blurb opportunities."

He adds: "Who would have thought that labelling could be so thrilling? It"s mostly the small things that take your breath away. Solving the simplest problems can give climb to the majority poignant enlarge in peculiarity of use and, in this case, is potentially life-saving."