美国Tomtec  www.tomtec.com
Tomtec has succeeded since 1967 by working with its clients to help solve their liquid handling needs. From 1967 to 1981, the Company had essentially one employee, Tom Astle. From 1967 to 1971, the Company operated as Astec, Inc. In 1971 the Company's name was changed to Tomtec, and incorporated. Tom Astle has been the President and CEO since that time.
In 1967, Tomtec developed the Autotiter. This automated what were then the manual microtiter techniques. The primary market was serology and virology. The original instruments were an essential element of Smith Kline's rubella vaccine program.

In 1972, Tomtec developed an automated "Microstainer". Tomtec brought the product line to market and sold initial production runs. Later this product line was sold to Dynatech. The next endeavor was the development of the Autostreaker. This instrument fully automated the primary plating process in clinical microbiology. The Company built and sold five systems immediately.

Industry experience and contacts led Tomtec to create and build custom made systems for automating pharmaceutical research. These systems were primarily used for automating soil screen programs. Automated agar cutting systems were made for Schering and Lilly. Then, a fully automated colony picking system was created and built for Bristol-Myers. Concurrently, Tomtec created and manufactured and automated instrument to rehydrate dry antibiotic microtiter plates for MicroScan. Two hundred instruments were manufactured and sold through Baxter/American Scientific Products.

Tomtec's business continued to evolve conceptualizing, developing, and manufacturing new instruments. In 1980, Tomtec developed the Gramstainer. Tomtec sold the Gramstainer direct in the USA. Worldwide sales were through distributors in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Benelux, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. Tomtec then developed a positive sample identification system for Travenol Genetech's HIV testing system.

By virtue of Tomtec's automation technology, and experience with pharmaceutical research, the Company embarked on the development of a high throughput fermentation system with a major pharmaceutical first.The objective was to pick up colonies, production media, and precess the broths by filtration for biological assays. The desired goal was to process 10,000 fermentations per week. A variety of equipment was developed through this program.

A new 24-well microplate was designed as the model. A filling system to dispense fermentation broths with their particulate matter was created. A system of bar codes was used to maintain the audit trail from the original soil sample through all of the process steps to the final assay result.

In 1988, working closely with key contacts in the pharmaceutical research area put Tomtec in the forefront of high volume screening. The Company developed a 96-well cell harvester, the Harvester96®. It was a requirement for receptor binding assays. This was followed several years later by the development of the Quadra96, a 96-well pipetting system. Today these two instrument product lines are in wide spread use throughout pharmaceutical and biotechnology research.

Recognizing the need for further automation, Tomtec developed the Quadra 9600 system. This is a fully robotic 96-well assay system for running practically all of the 96-well assays in use today - receptor binding assays, enzyme immunoassays, and cell based assays. The Quadra 9600 system employs a custom array of tray hotels, incubators, harvesters, scanners, readers, and pipetting stations. The System operates hands free by using a UNIX based computer control program.

Today, Tomtec is fully integrated. The Company has its own software engineering, electrical design group, and mechanical design engineering. Tomtec operates its own complete shop facilities including machining, precision sheet metal fabrication, welding and metal finishing. The Company has in-house capability to manufacture virtually everything it needs. Outside subcontractors are used where it is cost effective. Tomtec's products are sold through local distributors worldwide.