Tecan US, a company in the Life Sciences supply industry, has announced that IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. has developed and validated their HerdChek Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) Antigen EIA Test Kit using Tecan's Freedom EVO150 liquid handling platform with a Tecan Columbus Pro microplate washer and Tecan Sunrise absorbance reader.

The IDEXX BSE test is an antigen-capture enzyme immunoassay (EIA) for detection of the abnormal conformation of the prion protein (PrPsc), which has been associated with incidences of BSE in post-mortem brain tissues from affected bovine. Methods for rapid screening of post-mortem samples are essential to ensure that BSE-tainted products do not enter the market, and IDEXX's HerdChek Test Kit has been designed for rapid identification of samples containing disease-associated PrPsc with minimal sample handling.