In this exclusive interview, Jenny Littler, Senior Scientist at Warwick Antimicrobial Screening Facility shared her experience with using our HepG2 assay-ready plates. Here are the scripts.

Q: What screening work do you carry out?

A: We test compounds that come in for their antimicrobial effects against Cat 1 and Cat 2 bacteria. We also do cytotoxicity testing amongst other antimicrobial susceptibility testing. 

Q: What do you test?

A: We normally test against a variety of clinical samples also the ESKAPE pathogens, the ones that the world health organization classified as critically important for new antimicrobials. We do whatever the client wants. We can do antibiotics for bacteria or also antifungals. We do test normal fungi as well. 

Q: Who do you offer antimicrobial testing to?

A: We work with a variety of different people, from industry looking at nanoparticle such as silver nanoparticles but also academics. A lot of chemistry departments that we work with, and they send their compounds from different databases for what they’ve worked with. And we test their samples to see how well they work. 

Q: What cell lines do you use for toxicity testing? 

A: Normally we test against HepG2 at the moment, but we are open to whatever really our customers require. 

Q: How long does it take?

A: We like to do it as quickly as possible, but if we do the cell lines ourselves, obviously it takes time to get the confluence. Normally that takes 3-4 weeks if we do it all in-house. 

Q: How did CryoLogyx assay-ready plates help?

A: So we managed to get that down to 1 week. We had a quite last-minute customer come in, wanting to do a toxicity testing for a grant. With your help, we managed to get it done in 4 days. I believe it was quite a quick turnaround. So it was really helpful. We can’t use this main lab for cell culturing, so we saved cost that way. Normally we would cost per hour but obviously it is cheaper then for the customer as well as cheaper for us as a whole. 

Q: What’s the top benefit of using our pre-plated, assay-ready cells? 

A: I think it’s just how easy it was to follow the protocols. There's less faf – just defrost it. It was really simple, easy to follow, which is really helpful for us. And we were able to do everything in here so infrastructure-wise, it was really helpful. 

Q: Would you recommend our assay-ready plates? 

A: Of course, yes we have customers that will do toxicity testing and we are planning on using the plates again. So I definitely recommend to use in the future. 

Watch the full interview here.

For more information about our assay-ready plates and how they can streamline your research, visit our website or contact our team at info@cryologyx.com.