Portability changes what's possible in the lab — and in the field. A look at what true portability means for SPR and why it matters for modern research workflows.
Over a career working in the field of lab instrumentation and medtech, one analogy stands out: how quickly benchtop 3D printers grew from a novelty item into an indispensable prototyping tool in a company's product design workflow. Though not meant to replace traditional CNC machining or injection molding in high-throughput precision manufacturing, having a benchtop 3D printer enables a quick method to transform 3D visualization into a physical part. An industrial designer can:
- Shorten the design optimization cycle
- Avoid long turnaround booking/wait time on external or internal machine shops
- Achieve higher confidence when finally making a very expensive injection mold
For life scientists doing daily assay development and screening proteins and antibodies, there is an analogous benefit: you can simplify everyday R&D workflow with a portable SPR, especially in the area of assay optimization and troubleshooting. Having your own portable SPR on the bench means:
- No longer needing to book time or wait for a run to fill on the shared SPR machine
- Saving at least a couple of weeks of turnaround time that would otherwise go to centralized facilities
- If you provide CRO services, offering fast SPR results to your customers anytime, while keeping it very affordable
SPR versus ELISA for everyday R&D
R&D scientists working with ELISA may spend up to 80% of their time troubleshooting. Though a gold standard assay, a failed ELISA result is only known at the end of a long 3–4 hour run. With pharma investing typically $300k on supporting a FTE scientist, this trial-and-error approach can easily translate into thousands in lost productivity and consumables cost in a single day. Not to mention that there is still no good way to determine the root cause of the failed step(s).
With portable SPR, you can quickly gain insight into each preparation step. Label-free also means zero labelling influences on the observed interactions. In essence, portable SPR allows you to optimize and validate your surface chemistry preparations before you start a long and expensive run, whether it be ELISA or on complex high-throughput analytical instrumentation.
About Affinité Instruments
Based in Toronto, Canada, Affinité Instruments has made it its mission to offer portable, affordable, and easy-to-use SPR to enable all life science researchers to have SPR as a tool for quick binding analysis, bioproduction quality control, biomarker identification, assay development, and even in-vitro diagnostics.
Contact us today to learn more about how Affinité portable SPR can revolutionize your assay development and drug discovery workflow.