Simplify Complex Nucleic Acid Extractions: Learn how to build walk away automated methods for FFPE, ccfDNA, Blood etc.

In this Forum, you will learn about:

  • Principles of nucleic acid extraction using magnetic particles and liquid handling robots
  • The foundational work you need before building a method
  • How to build and troubleshoot an automated nucleic acid extraction workflow
  • How to address troublesome samples such as FFPE, circulating cell-free DNA, large volume blood, RNA extraction from biopsies, etc.

Summary

Automating your nucleic acid extraction workflows can enable higher throughput, improve precision, reduce labor, etc. However, developing the methods on highly flexible and sophisticated liquid handling workstations such as the Hamilton, Tecan, Beckman Coulter etc. is non-trivial and requires an understanding of the robotics, the biological sample, the extraction chemistry, and the quality requirements of the downstream application to assess the performance of the workflow. Developing workflows for the first time can take months depending on one’s experience and challenging samples just adds complexity. The forum will focus on developing optimized workflows for challenging samples, including FFPE, circulating cell-free DNA, large volume blood, and RNA extraction from biopsies, where automation can be particularly complex and impactful.

Speakers

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Doug Horejsh, PhD
Associate Director, R&D

Douglas Horejsh is an Associate Director in the Protein and Nucleic Acid Analysis Division of Research & Development at Promega Corporation. He focuses on the development of nucleic acid purification systems designed to yield high-quality nucleic acids from challenging starting materials. His team works on creating purification chemistries for both manual and automated formats and develops fluorescent dyes for nucleic acid quantitation.

Before joining Promega, Douglas served as a clinical laboratory director at a molecular pathology company in Virginia. His responsibilities included identifying, evaluating, validating, and integrating IVD and LDT assays within a clinical laboratory setting. He also managed BSL-3 facilities and led contract research on emerging and biodefense pathogens.

Douglas is the author of 20 journal articles and holds several world and Italian patents. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 and completed his post-doctoral training at the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, MD.

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Rick Grygiel
Supervisor, Field Support Scientists

Rick Grygiel joined Promega in 2018.  He is the Supervisor, Field Support Scientists for North America.  He and his team support the implementation of Promega chemistries on laboratory high throughput automation (Hamilton, Tecan, Beckman, ThermoFisher and other instrumentation).  Their support combines chemistry and instrumentation expertise to provide customers with tailored automation solutions, training, and support.  This enables customers to implement Promega chemistries more rapidly without being chemistry or instrument experts themselves.

Rick joined Promega after spending over 17 years with a molecular diagnostics company, the latter 15 years as a Field Automation & Applications Scientist.  During this time, he helped over 100 laboratories automate their nucleic acid purification and molecular testing workflows on various platforms.  In addition, he was instrumental in the successful development and launch of several Class I and Class III medical devices.  Rick has a degree in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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Brandon Krueger
Field Support Scientist

Brandon Krueger is a Field Support Scientist with Promega Corporation. His main role is to utilize a diversity of automated high throughput platforms (Tecan, Hamilton, Beckman, Eppendorf, ThermoFisher and other instrumentation) to create and develop custom automated scripts using Promega reagents (nucleic acid, protein purification, and cell-based assay workflows) in customer laboratories or internally, as a technical product expert for reagent and instrument applications.

He joined Promega after spending 13 years in a clinical research laboratory working with small molecule pharmaceuticals. During his time there he led all automation opportunities on Hamilton Robotics platforms as well as serviced their Hamilton MicroLabSTAR platforms.