Ziath has been called into action to provide equipment in the fight against COVID-19.
Stephen Knight, Director of Sales & Marketing at Ziath Ltd said: "The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has sadly already claimed the lives of over 20,000 people worldwide. The World Health Organisation has stated that widespread testing of people for coronavirus COVID-19 will help health services identify infected patients and more effectively focus resource to first curb, and then defeat, this virulent pathogen. With test samples in many countries now reaching tens of thousands per week there is a critical need to quickly and reliably test and keep track of patient samples".
Dr Haim M Barr, Head of HTS & Medicinal Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel) said: "Faced with an explosion in sample test numbers we wanted to reliably track suspected coronavirus COVID-19 patient swabs to tubes and then to racks of 96. For this task we needed a high-quality fast camera-based scanner that would allow us to establish a traceable workflow of scanned patient swab tubes.
"With the Ziath Mirage we can track the swab tube, the receiving tube (2D barcode on bottom) and then scan for all the locations in the rack as the it goes onto the liquid handling robot. With labs like ours working against the clock—delivery in just three days of a Ziath DataPaq Mirage Rack Scanner, together with their Single Tube reader for random-access scanning—has helped us considerably".
As a camera-based instrument, the DataPaq Mirage Rack Scanner combines high image quality and fast scanning to provide reliable results in a couple of seconds. The scanner accepts all SBS-format tube racks, making it easy to present coded sample tubes, even when wearing cryoprotective or anti-contamination clothing. The DataPaq Mirage is designed to be easy to set-up, straight out of the box and installation of the application software takes just a few minutes.
