SP Scientific’s Genevac EZ-2 centrifugal evaporator is providing the Clinical Biochemistry department at a leading UK hospital with a reliable, easy-to-use method of preparing clinical samples ready for testing.
Clinical laboratories play a vital role in the healthcare industry as about 80% of the clinician’s diagnoses are based on laboratory analysis with a range of tests carried out on clinical specimens, to obtain information about the health of a patient to aid in diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. These departments commonly perform automated quantitative tests on serum or plasma patient samples for a wide array of substances including lipids, blood sugar, enzymes and hormones.
The recent introduction of an EZ2 centrifugal evaporation system for clinical biochemistry sample preparation has provided this particular hospital's laboratory staff with considerable advantages compared with the manual dry down evaporation methods previously used.
Using the EZ-2 evaporator the Clinical Biochemistry department has been able to set-up a suite of automated methods whereby the user simply loads samples, selects the appropriate solvent removal method and presses start. Proprietary technology on the EZ-2 allows the instrument to stop by itself at the end of evaporation process. This frees up staff time to do more productive work than monitoring their evaporator and has increased throughput of the laboratory. Productivity has also been increased as the EZ-2 can handle a large number of samples per run, which are quickly evaporated to dryness in just a matter of minutes.
The enclosed design of the EZ-2 evaporator and cold trap has ensured that waste solvents are collected and staff safety is enhanced as vapours are no longer released into the laboratory atmosphere.
In addition, the reliability of sample preparation has improved. Not only has the EZ-2 evaporator eliminated cross contamination between samples, but its advanced temperature control avoids sample degradation and hence the need to repeat analyses or doubts about the analytical result obtained. Clinical biochemistry staff say they would find it hard to go back to the old manual methods of evaporative sample preparation used before the EZ-2 arrived.