We are happy to repost here a news published by our Finnish partners at Mekalasi OY!

The clinical microbiology laboratory at the HUS Diagnostic Center in Helsinki, Finland, has been equipped with Copan’s lab automation since 2020. The lab currently automates its workflow with two WASPLab® culture automation lines, which include four Walk-Away Specimen Processor™ WASP® units, two connected incubators, and PhenoMATRIX® software that utilizes Artificial Intelligence for plate interpretation. Now, two Colibrí™ picking modules are being installed in connection with the automation line.

Colibrí™ is a device that automatically picks colonies on a culture plate – either selected by user input or by the AI PhenoMATRIX® TAG software – to perform MALDI-TOF identification or to prepare a suspension for Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing. Colibrí™ pipetting robot ensures precise colony selection, while the nephelometer checks the turbidity of the suspension. This further step toward lab automation improves even more HUS lab accuracy, standardization, and traceability while optimizing the laboratory workflow.

The HUS Diagnostics Center concentrates samples from satellite laboratories for the screening of UTIs and streptococci. The number of samples reaching the laboratory has increased significantly in recent years, and automation has helped handle growing sample volumes while maintaining quality.

Currently, more than 90 Colibrí™ have been installed worldwide – with 40 in Europe – but the two automation being installed at the HUS Diagnostic Center are the first in Finland and Scandinavia. Colibrí™ is conceived and produced by Copan, a family business founded in 1979 in Brescia, Italy. Copan manufactures and develops sample collection and transport devices and automation solutions for the needs of bacteriology, virology, and molecular biology. Noteworthy, Copan transports the equipment with its own trucks, and its in-house logistics is a part of its quality assurance and comprehensive care of the delivery process.

The Colibrí™ installation is carried out by Mekalasi’s maintenance staff and Copan experts. Mekalasi has its own Finnish-speaking service organization in Finland, with professional staff available for user and troubleshooting support if needed. After the installation, trained and certified personnel perform periodic maintenance following the equipment manufacturer’s maintenance program, ensuring full functionality and user safety.

The bacteriology automation system at the HUS Diagnostic Center is customized and optimized to meet the laboratory’s sample flows and workflow needs. The modular solution has been expanded since 2020. After the first WASP® installed, another two followed, and in 2022, WASPLab® was delivered. Last year, the second WASPLab® and the fourth WASP® were delivered. Now it’s the turn of the two Colibrí™. Who knows what’s next?

The original news can be found here!

Enjoy the studies we selected for you this month:

• Multi-drug resistant fungus Candida Auris is recognized as a critical issue by the WHO. Its permanence on human skin and surfaces makes hospital surveillance protocols essential to prevent nosocomial outbreaks. The study by Curtoni and colleagues aimed to apply Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to examine the phylogenetic relationships among strains isolated from a C. auris outbreak in the ICU of a hospital in Turin, Italy. The results identified a dominant Alpha cluster and a minor Beta cluster. These findings were validated using an external C. auris strain and through Principal Component and Linear Discriminant Analyses. This study results highlight how FT-IR technology can provide valuable information on the phylogenetic relationships between microorganism strains and propose FT-IR as a cost-effective alternative to molecular methods for rapid and efficient typing of C. auris strains, with important clinical implications.
• The 2022 global spread of monkeypox led to the expansion of diagnostic testing worldwide. In the second study we selected, the Canadian researchers collected specimens from patients in Ontario to evaluate the performance characteristics of five RT-PCR assays in detecting Monkeypox during the 2022 outbreak. Swabs from various anatomical sites were collected, and all assays demonstrated excellent negative percent agreement, positive percent agreement, limit of detection, and precision. An amplicon-based whole-genome sequencing analysis identified six different monkeypox lineages. These results underline the need for performance monitoring to detect assay escape mutants and ensure the universal detection of evolving monkeypox strains.
• The third study investigated the culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from tongue swabs, either experimentally spiked after collection from healthy controls or directly sampled from patients with microscope-confirmed pulmonary tuberculosis. The performance of three culture processing methods was evaluated: NALC-NaOH/MGIT960 (MGIT), Kudoh-Ogawa (KO), and cetylpyridinium chloride-L¨owenstein-Jensen (CPC/LJ). Overall, the study concludes that MGIT is the optimal method for culturing Mycobacterium tuberculosis from tongue swabs. Anyhow

Read the full studies: