Product News: Sartorius has launched the Octet R Series for label-free, real-time molecular analysis, designed with versatility and future-proofing in mind

The life science group Sartorius has launched the new high-performance Octet^® R series of systems, the latest improvement in the company’s line of label-free analytical products. With three different models to choose from, users can strike the right balance between throughput needs and budget. 

Budget-sensitive users will enjoy the possibility of field upgradeability; the Octet^® R2 and Octet^® R4 can be upgraded to an Octet^® R4 or Octet^® R8, respectively, within a single service visit to achieve higher throughput. All three systems accommodate a wide range of applications and sample types required in the biologics development workflow.

The Octet^® R series leverages the company's proprietary Bio-Layer Interferometry (BLI) technology, which uses optical biosensors to measure molecular interactions in parallel, without the use of detection agents. All instruments offer an advanced, fast, robust, and fluidics-free approach for kinetic characterization of antibody, protein, and small-molecule binding interactions. These systems enable direct detection of specific proteins and other biomolecules — even in complex mixtures and unpurified samples like cell culture supernatants and lysates.

“Users of label-free applications in academia and at start-up biotech companies have historically been stuck between choosing to pay a premium for capacity they will never use or to settle for a lower-performance entry level system,” said Payal Khandelwal, Head of Product Management, Protein Analysis, at Sartorius.

“The Octet^® R series is ideal for academic start-up and low volume labs that are looking for affordable, high quality, label-free capabilities without compromising on assay sensitivity. Plus, the flexibility to upgrade when throughput demands increase protects and futureproofs their investment.”

The aggressive pace of scientific advancements and breakthroughs demands that labs around the globe produce high quality, reproducible data with limited budgets and short timelines. Octet® BLI instruments have served such needs for over a decade, by providing fluidics-free, low maintenance and sensitive systems. These systems increase lab productivity, reduce cost, and shorten experimental timelines.

“Octet^® BLI has been an essential tool for customers developing novel drugs, therapeutics and biosimilars, providing more efficient and flexible assays for biomolecular interaction analysis,” commented Payal. “We listened to our customers and are excited to launch the new Octet® R series of instruments with enhanced scalable throughput, assay and sample versatility. Our goal is to deliver innovative products that continually offer higher data quality to improve the outcomes of life science research and development projects.”

The Octet^® platform is a comprehensive characterization tool with unprecedented ease of use and cost-efficiency across a range of applications in various stages of drug and biologics development, including antibody and protein quantitation. It circumvents limitations of ELISA and HPLC platforms, enabling informed decisions to be made earlier in the development pipeline. Octet^® systems use standard microplate formats enabling high-throughput, automated binding analysis directly in the plates. Precious samples can be recovered for further use as sample consumption during analysis is minimal. The systems offer superior quantitation and kinetics performance for a diverse range of molecules over a broad dynamic range and a sensitivity to detect molecules as small as 150 Daltons. The instruments can measure both high- and low-affinity interactions. They can detect fast binding interactions including protein-small molecule binding.

“With simplicity comes tremendous confidence and freedom to experiment and excel. At Sartorius, our goal is to accelerate research with this new expandable, modular, label free molecular analysis platform,” said Payal. “As evidenced by over 5,000 peer reviewed publications, scientists are getting the results needed to progress research quickly and easily with the combined innovation, support and expertise of Sartorius Octet^®.”

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