Arrayjet Launches Peerless Benchtop Inkjet Microarray Spotter for R&D Market

Unique technology re-packaged for assay development and optimisation

May 15th 2007 Edinburgh UK: Arrayjet today announced the release of the Sprint benchtop inkjet microarray spotter, at the Advances in Microarray Technology (AMT) Conference in Edinburgh. The Sprint employs the same patented technology which made the company’s earlier microarray spotters so successful in what was previously believed to be a shrinking market. The new, smaller, Sprint has been developed with the same attention to detail as the earlier products ensuring dependably consistent and robust microarray spotting. Designed for printing smaller batches of slides in a more R&D-focussed mode, the Sprint has the capacity for 20 microarray slides to be loaded and printed from two microtitre plates (96 or 384-well) in walkaway mode; two further plates may be added manually by the user in relay mode. Additional substrate carriers will also be available for the Sprint to enable printing onto non-glass slide substrates such as silicon-wafers or glass-bottomed plates, making it a more flexible offering than the larger instruments.

Graham Miller, Arrayjet’s Chief Executive commented, “Since commercialising our technology in mid-2005, we have shown ourselves to be a significant player in the microarray spotter market. For example, as protein microarrays move from research into diagnostics, Arrayjet is well-placed to work with the scientists and organisations leading this development.” Mr Miller continued, “We continue to receive a lot of attention and interest in our products, and the quality of protein microarray data produced on our spotter platform speaks for itself.” As a testament to the level of interest this technology has aroused in the market, the first Sprint machine was sold well before today’s release.

Mr Miller concluded, “The timing and location of the AMT conference couldn’t have served us better for the launch of this new instrument. AMT has brought all of the world’s leading Microarray scientists and companies to Edinburgh, and they will all get a chance to see the new Arrayjet Sprint.” AMT has almost doubled in size year on year and has as a result become the foremost microarray conference in Europe; its scope has further increased with two additional conference sessions, ‘Lab-on-a-Chip World Congress’ (Life Science Applications) and ‘SEQNSYNTECH’ (Advances in DNA Sequencing & Synthesis).

Sales and Marketing Director Duncan Hall commented, “We enjoyed tremendous success with our spotters at a time when some of our competitors were seeing a drop off in spotter sales. The release of the Sprint opens up a whole new market to Arrayjet. Customers had asked us for access to our technology in a more compact, R&D-focussed instrument; with the Sprint we have done just that.”

The introduction of the Sprint has also led Arrayjet to name its other products appropriately. The Aj100 will now be known as the Marathon, the Aj120 as the Super-Marathon and the Aj100/Aj120 with additional slide stacker, which will be launched in early 2008, as the Ultra-Marathon.

Notes for Editors:
Arrayjet® Ltd was founded in August 2000 by physicist Dr. Howard Manning (University of Cambridge), and molecular biologists Prof. Peter Ghazal and Dr. Douglas Roy (University of Edinburgh), to develop biological microarrays robotics using inkjet print-heads. In February 2001 Arrayjet secured two-stage funding from the Scotland based investor group Archangels and won a Scottish Enterprise SMART award. Dr. Manning is Arrayjet's Technical Director and Keith Howell, an Edinburgh based director and consultant, is Chairman. Professor Ghazal is chief scientific advisor and Dr Roy is lead advisor on microarrays. Duncan Hall, previously with Agilent Technologies, joined in early 2005 as Sales and Marketing Director. Graham Miller, formerly of PerkinElmer, is the CEO.

Arrayjet Microarray spotters have over 100 nozzles and produce microarrays of very high quality, with excellent morphology, uniformity, consistency and robustness. The extra nozzles also give an additional advantage in that there is redundancy in the print-head – it carries spare capacity on every print run. Academic and commercial researchers will benefit equally from the careful design and ingenuity of the instruments, since standard pin-based microarray spotters often produce differentiation in print quality; those producing their own arrays will no longer have quadrants of the chip that have higher densities of macromolecules than others. www.arrayjet.co.uk .