COPAN Diagnostics, Inc. is pleased to announce the unveiling of the Colibri™ system this week in New Orleans. COPAN is renowned for its forward compatible, flexible and modular approach to total lab automation. Colibri™ is the latest addition to COPAN’s successful line of automation. Colibri™ is an open platform capable of utilizing a diversity of consumables from different suppliers or prepared in house. In keeping with the philosophy of developing open platforms, Colibri™ can work in-line with WASPLab™ or as a standalone workstation to automatically prepare AST and ID suspensions and seed MALDI-TOF target plates with more functionality to come.

Colibri™ is unlike any other instrument in Microbiology. It automatically picks colonies, based upon digital coordinates previously specified by the laboratory technologists, for further workup and investigations. The workups include McFarland suspensions for antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) and traditional organism identification by biochemistry and purity plates, seeding MALDI-TOF target plates and applying the matrix. Colibri™ can seed colonies into various size tubes and bottles to prepare McFarland suspensions and apply barcode labels automatically. Its onboard Nephelometer automatically checks the opacity of the McFarland suspensions and prepares a plate to check the purity of the bacterial growth prepared in the McFarland suspension tube. Colibri™ can also seed both Bruker Biotyper and Vitek MS MALDI-TOF target plates and automatically send instructions and coordinates to build the worksheets.

“We are really excited about this new innovation. Colibri™ can also handle offline plates previously not managed by full laboratory automation, can be manually loaded and colonies can be manually designated for picking using an onboard camera and touch screen. We designed Colibri™ to be a versatile open platform instrument able to work with different technologies and with the future needs of the microbiology lab in mind” states Norman Sharples, CEO and Co-Founder of COPAN Diagnostics, Inc.

The instrument was first launched in Copenhagen in May during ECCMID, and will be displayed for the first time in North America at the American Society for Microbiology General Meeting in New Orleans.