Validation Of ICON™ Automated Cell Counting And Viability Assay

Determination of cell viability and concentration using trypan blue exclusion is essential for biotherapeutic workflows, enabling optimisation of protocols, monitoring of changes to the culture environment, and selection of the best clones for culture progression. Automated and semi-automated counters have begun to alleviate the cell counting bottlenecks of the biopharmaceutical industry, yet still often assess one sample at a time, require cross-referencing to other databases or workbooks, and rely on manual calibration. The ICON™ instrument has been designed to assist high-throughput workflows by conducting up to 24 viable cell counts at a time without the need for manual calibration or gating. This study aimed to validate ICON’s Viability Assay by measuring cell samples with a range of expected concentrations and viabilities, while simultaneously comparing its performance to that of a well-known commercially available cell counter. ICON consistently displayed lower variation between repeats, increased precision, and saved time when compared to the competitor cell counter, making it the ideal choice for high-throughput cell line development workflows.