FROM THE LABS : TOSCANA LIFE SCIENCES
“ A monoclonal can be used in an emergency situation .”
Growing these cultures requires an expensive supernatant — a medium that encourages B cells to grow and produce mAbs — and even a good batch of antibodies only yields about 50 microliters of sample . Once the scientists have coaxed antibodies out of the memory B cells , tools like the D300e BioPrinter help researchers dose each sample more precisely , and allow them to run more tests with smaller amounts of each sample , preserving vital resources .
12:00 P . M . / Time for an insalatona Work continued at Toscana Life Sciences even during the height of the pandemic in Italy , but a lot has changed . Now , the cafeteria where Sala eats lunch every day is less collegial , with people sitting apart and eating in spaces divided by plastic shields . And at times during this project , she couldn ’ t sit and enjoy her meal , stopping only long enough to finish a salad or sandwich before heading back to work . As the team moves into later phases of testing , Sala occasionally has a moment to pause , enjoy a break , and chat with colleagues from other labs .
2:00 P . M . / Finding the best fit The next step is to test each mAb to see how well it binds to the spike protein : The stronger the bond , the better the treatment will be . But out of the 4,000 antibodies Sala ’ s team collected , only 300 can bind to SARS- CoV-2 and only a few will be good options for a treatment . Running tests on those hundreds of antibodies to find out which are the best takes a long time , and setting up those tests — mixing the antibodies with the right reagents , pipetting each of the antibodies into 384 tiny wells — takes a lot of work .
That ’ s where HP ’ s bioprinters come in again . Printing ink on a page isn ’ t so different from depositing tiny amounts of fluid into well plates : The printer has to be able to steadily control the volume of liquid it releases and deposit it in exactly the right spot . “ Think of the amount of directional control of an amount of fluid that we have
to have to print a photo on your desktop printer . That ’ s thousands of droplets per square inch ,” says Annette Friskopp , Global Head and General Manager of Specialty Printing Systems at HP . “ Already we have a lot of capability handling the directionality of the drop and where it ’ s going .”
For biological labs like Sala ’ s , HP also had to figure out how to distribute different kinds of fluids accurately and reliably , even though every mixture has a different surface tension and viscosity . The D300e helps the lab screen for the right mAbs much faster , both in its COVID-19 research and in other projects on antibiotic-resistant bacteria . While it might take a researcher hours to get all 384 wells ready , the HP D300e BioPrinter can do it in just three or four minutes .
“ It ’ s extremely fast , it ’ s extremely precise , and it ’ s extremely reliable , which are all advantages for the customers ,” says Raffaella Fior , a research engineer at HP .
6:00 P . M . / Awaiting clinical trials After another round of emails , Sala checks in with the researchers one last time , says good-bye to her colleagues , and gets in her car for the five-minute drive home . When the project first started , she says , they all worked late into the night running tests . “ We had quite long days , including weekends ,” she recalls .
Once the team found the most promising monoclonals for COVID-19 , they sequenced
ESSENTIAL WORKERS MAD Lab scientists Emanuele Andreano , Claudia Sala , Marco Troisi , and Anna Kabanova are members of the team researching COVID-19 treatments .
the mAbs ’ DNA and then cloned them , producing an army of identical antibodies that are highly specialized to bind to the SARS- CoV-2 virus and stop an infection , before people develop serious symptoms .
Now , workdays are a little shorter as the researchers wait to start human trials . Sala ’ s lab has already sent samples to the University of Georgia for testing in animals and is also working with a company in Italy that uses bioreactors to grow large enough quantities of the mAbs to start phase one clinical trials at the much faster pace this pandemic requires .
Sala ’ s team is one of several around the world testing mAbs as a possible treatment for COVID-19 , and she says that other benefits could be that the mAbs her team identifies are more reliable to produce on a large scale , or have a greater affinity for SARS-CoV-2 , making a more potent product or one that could be combined with others to create an even more powerful treatment .
Sala says racing to find a cure has been exhausting and intense , but also incredibly rewarding . Everyone in the lab is pulling together , working on something they believe could help millions of people . “ I think this was the motivation that helped us push the boundaries ,” she says .
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