Synbiosis, a world-leading manufacturer of automated microbiological systems, is pleased to announce that ProtoCOL, its automated colony counter is being used at start-up Austrian biotech firm, BIRD-C GmbH&CoKEG to help save time with research on novel vaccines against lethal bacteria such as Escherichia coli O157.

Scientists at BIRD-C are developing several vaccines based on the novel bacterial ghost platform technology. They are using the ProtoCOL to rapidly determine the efficiency of vaccine formulations by counting bacterial colonies on plating media during their specific production process.

Dr Beate Mayr, Chief Production Officer at BIRD-C explained: 'We evaluate 200-300 plates per week and before we installed a ProtoCOL system four staff members would spend one day every week counting plates and inputting data, which was not the best use of their time.'

Dr Mayr continued: 'Using the ProtoCOL we can carry out one day's worth of manual plate counting in minutes and everyone can do the plate counts for their own experiments because it is no longer time consuming or laborious. The other bonus is that all the numerical data is automatically entered in an Excel format so we can analyse it quickly, as well as keep good records. In fact, we are so pleased with the performance of the ProtoCOL we have purchased a second system.'

Martin Smith of Synbiosis concluded: 'For biotech companies staff costs are often the biggest overhead so their time needs to be utilised effectively. As BIRD-C has shown, using a ProtoCOL to perform rapid colony counts can reduce the time highly qualified staff spend on repetitive tasks and because the results are well documented they will comply with the requirements of any regulatory agencies too. This combination of increased productivity and secure data storage makes ProtoCOL ideal for any pharma or biotech developing vaccines against bacterial diseases.'