Falcon II reduces manual handling by up to 70%, replacing it with standardised automated operations, and brings down the production time by around 60%, to be able to process up to 384 samples per day
Falcon II Intelligent Delivery Platform. (Credit: PRNewswire/Novogene Corporation.)
Novogene America, a genomic services company focused on next-generation sequencing (NGS), has unveiled Falcon II, its new-generation robot platform for the automated delivery of multiple NGS services.
Falcon II extends the company’s previous generation Falcon platform, the first fully optimised, automated, and intelligent NGS delivery platform launched in March 2020.
Falcon was applied for intelligent and automated sample extraction, sample Quality Control, library preparation, library Quality Control, library pooling and bioinformatics analysis.
Novogene said that its new-generation solution is a compact version of Falcon, and will significantly improve the efficiency, reliability, and quality of NGS delivery.
Novogene founder and CEO Li Ruiqiang said: “Novogene’s customer-focused approach is at the core of our commitment to become the world’s leading provider of genomic solutions and services. We are always striving to enhance the customer experience through innovation.
“Falcon II is an example of how Novogene is leading the industry to transform operations with huge improvements in digitalisation and automation, ultimately leading to improved services, reduced turnaround time and greater accuracy.”
Falcon II was designed and developed exclusively by Novogene’s in-house team, and owns its intellectual property rights from hardware installation to software.
With modular construction and relatively small footprint, the system can be configured at variety of lab layouts and experimental scenarios.
It integrates 16 sets of precision instruments to support multiple NGS services, including RNA Sequencing and Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS).
Falcon II reduces manual handling by up to 70%, replacing it with standardised automated operations and eliminating manual errors that lead to contamination.
Also, it brings down the production time by around 60%, which enables a single Falcon II line to process up to 384 samples per day, said Novogene.
In a real-case application, RNA sequencing usually requires 16 days from library construction to data delivery for 300 standard samples.
The company claimed that its Falcon II system will complete the same process in 90 hours, with a 5% increased pass rate of library construction.