STEMCELL Technologies has announced the Grand Prize Winner and Finalists of the Walk Away With A RoboSep™ Facebook photo contest. The contest celebrated the lives and creativity of immunologists, by inviting entrants to share their stories of what they would do if they could walk away from handling cell separation with RoboSep™, the fully automated cell separator. The photo entries were then posted on Facebook, where they could be liked by members of the STEMCELL Technologies Facebook fan community.

With over 600 likes on their entry, the lab of Toshihisa Kawai at the Forsyth Institute has been awarded use of a RoboSep™ automated cell separator for one year. Their winning submission, RoboSep™ lets me walk away to harvest new blood cells, was created by Harrison Mackler, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine working in the Kawai lab. Harrison and another undergraduate student in the lab, Weilin Ina Chen, served as key drivers of this entry's win. They advertised it widely across Facebook and email, and inspired the Forsyth Institute as a whole to rally around their entry, which pulled ahead to victory in the closing hours of the contest.

As Dr. Kawai noted, "having the RoboSep™ will [now] enable us to work faster, and increase the pace of our study". Dr. Kawai plans to use the new RoboSep™ unit to isolate mouse dendritic cells, in a project that his lab is currently collaborating on with Dr. David Mooney of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Nine runner-up Finalists were also awarded an EasySep™ magnet, which enables manual, column-free cell separation of immune cells in as little as 25 minutes. All contest photo entries are still available in the photo album Walk Away With A RoboSep™ Contest at www.facebook.com/stemcelltechnologies.

RoboSep™ is the first true walk-away immune cell separator, capable of isolating highly purified immune cells from up to four samples simultaneously by using the EasySep™ technology. It reduces valuable technician time and minimizes sample handling of potentially infectious biological samples. To learn more about RoboSep™ or EasySep™, please visit www.robosep.com or www.easysep.com.

About STEMCELL Technologies

STEMCELL Technologies Inc is a leader in the development and marketing of specialty cell culture media, cell separation products and ancillary reagents for life science research. Driven by science and enabled by close interactions with global leaders in cell biology and medicine, STEMCELL delivers over 900 products to research scientists in more than 70 countries worldwide. To learn more about how STEMCELL helps to make research work, visit www.stemcell.com