https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180730005539/en/

GERMANTOWN, Md. & HILDEN, Germany, and RENO, Nev.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 30, 2018--QIAGEN N.V. (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) and Hamilton Robotics, a privately held leader in automation and liquid handling technology, today announced a new collaboration to improve processing of QIAGEN’s QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus (QFT-Plus) diagnostic test through the integration of Hamilton’s Microlab ® STAR™ automated liquid handling workstation into the QFT-Plus assay workflow. QIAGEN’s fourth-generation QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus is the modern gold standard for latent tuberculosis (TB) detection.

QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus offers customers the most flexible workflow among TB screening tests, including a single-tube option that enables efficient screening in large-scale programs by collecting blood samples at patient sites and transporting them to labs for processing up to 53 hours after venipuncture. Use of the Microlab STAR workstation will standardize and automate the manual steps in liquid handling for those samples, which can reduce hands-on time by 50% or more, provide greater ease of use and ensure consistency in pre-analytic methods, reducing processing errors and variability between runs.