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Don Whitley Scientific once again attended the Institute of Biomedical Science’s bi-annual conference, exhibiting products including the WASPLab, manufactured by Copan Italia SPA. Held at the ICC in Birmingham, the IBMS Congress is perhaps the most important meeting for the clinical audience. Standing alongside companies such as Leica, Olympus and CellPath, Don Whitley Scientific attended IBMS to promote equipment and services specifically designed for the clinical field.
Representatives from Copan joined Don Whitley Scientific on the exhibition stand, with whom they work with to distribute, install and integrate products in the UK. WASPLab is a robotic machine that could lead to huge advances in microbiology. WASPLab, which stands for Walk Away Specimen Processor Lab, moves samples from front end processing to full specimen management, automated incubation and digital microbiology, and visitors to the stand at IBMS could get up close and see these processes in action.
Featured on the Don Whitley Scientific stand was a Whitley A35 Workstation as well as a ProtoCOL 3 colony counter and zone measurer. The Whitley A35 Workstation drew lots of attention from passers by. An important element of clinical lab work is the ability to incubate samples quickly and efficiently. With the patented Instant Access Porthole and rapid airlock system on the A35 providing a fantastic solution for this, people were very impressed. The ProtoCOL 3 was being shown with the mASTer software. This software makes it easier to assess how resistant or susceptible bacteria are to antibiotics. The system also measures the sample alongside breakpoint values in the EUCAST database.
Nicola Millican, a biomedical scientist from Leeds General Infirmary also attended the IBMS as a guest of Don Whitley Scientific. Nicola gave a New Technology Showcase presentation explaining how Leeds put together a successful business case for the purchase of WASPLab for the microbiology department at the LGI.
An exciting competition prize was also a popular attraction to the stand as the chance to win “Bob” the Meccanoid G15 Personal Robot was on offer to the winner of the trivia question. The question focused on the fact that Don Whitley Scientific designs and manufactures products in house and is a company that is “engineering your future in microbiology”. Bob epitomised this ethos as he was made out of Meccano, a model construction system also made by a proud British company with an innovator at its helm, Frank Hornby. The winner of Bob is Lorraine Clark, from John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxfordshire.
The IBMS congress was once again a fantastic success for Don Whitley Scientific – it was an important event for showing our products to people working in biomedical science and a great opportunity to exhibit WASPLab once again.
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