What does assay-ready mean?

Conventionally, cells are stored in master cell banks. Working cell banks are made by growing and dividing a master bank aliquot. A vial from the working bank is then used for experiments, being thawed and then grown from an initial number of cells (usually in the 1 to 5 million range) to an amount suitable for the experiment's needs; generally 30 million of cells, sometimes a lot more! 

With assay-ready cell plates, someone does the hard work culturing the cells for you, then re-banks the cells at higher densities. Some companies will even prepare cells, plate them and send them fresh, which then need to be used within hours of them arriving. 

At CryoLogyx, we provide the best of both worlds: being able to offer cells that are both frozen assay-ready, and are pre-plated, for maximum research acceleration and lab simplification.

OK, so what are cryopreserved assay-ready cells?

Cryopreserved thaw-and-use cells are adherent cell lines that have been cultured and plated into microplates with the specific density and format you need to conduct your cell-based assays in monolayer format. These are frozen to create a bank of plates that can be used directly from the freezer with no cell culture, counting or validation required. 

And how do cryopreserved cells work?

Traditionally it would take one to two weeks for frozen cells to go through the culture stage (six to 14 days), plate (24 hours) and then test. Using our CryoShield technology, you would receive frozen banked plates with a thaw time of 8 to 24-hours and they are then ready to use for testing.  Using our robust tried and tested method – through our innovative CryoShield technology - we can provide a solution for an age-old challenge, without having a negative impact on the cells.  Our advanced processes eliminate the need for cell culture, significantly reducing your time-to-experiment from days to mere hours. By culturing, plating, and banking cells at scale, we ensure that you can conduct assays over several months using the same batch of cells, thereby avoiding the common issues associated with maintaining culture stability or experiencing a loss of function over multiple passages. Additionally, the use of frozen pre-plated cells allows for the seamless re-running of experiments weeks or even months later, ensuring consistent and reliable results.

So these will work the same as unfrozen monolayers?

Our frozen cell monolayers display comparable performance to freshly prepared monolayers. The metabolic function of the cells is undisturbed, tested by resazurin reduction to resorufin. Caspase activation, an indicator of programmed cell death, was minimised confirming that cell health remains excellent post thaw. Cell cycle, morphology and growth rates are also minimally affected making frozen plated cells ideal for screening drug candidates:

‘Thaw-and-Use Cryopreserved Cells’ are excellent for a range of cell-based assays, from transfection studies to running toxicity screening experiments for drug candidates. No specialised equipment is required for the thawing procedure. Simply remove the protective film, add cell media, and incubate overnight. In addition, with improved efficiencies, reduction of single-use plastics in the laboratory and lower operating costs – it’s clear to see the benefits that pre-plated thaw-and-use cells can provide.

What about the cryoprotectant?

To thaw our cryopreserved pre-plated cell products, all you have to do is add warm cell culture media (whichever you would normally use for your assay) to the wells once the plate is removed from the freezer. After a single wash, this removes 99.5% of the cryoprotectant from the cells, which we have measured with fluorescently tagged cryoprotectant.