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Promega UK, the Life Sciences Company, based on the University of Southampton Science Park in Hampshire, has announced the winners of its first Helix Sustainability award.

Helix is an onsite RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) laboratory storage system used to support scientists with their life sciences research fighting diseases such as Cancer and Alzheimer’s.

The cabinets, fridges and freezers supplied by Promega store products designed to make scientists’ projects easier to administer, by supplying their most used reagents and assays in a local storage device. The device is supplied free of charge to customers using Promega products. This means they can simply swipe a card or use a phone app to take what they need for their experiment (as each item has an ‘RFID’ tag on it for billing and replenishment) – even in the middle of the night, when traditional supply stores are closed.

The criteria for the award win was to recognise the organisation(s) who had gained the most environmental benefit from having the system; from Promega’s UK customers across the public and private sectors. Calculations were made after considering the number of individual shipments saved and associated packaging costs, including dry ice use.

The top three institutions are:

1. University of Edinburgh
2. University of Manchester
3. University of Glasgow

By using Helix, the top three organisations saved a combined total of 1000 shipments.

Commenting on the Gold Helix Award, Colin Miller, Procurement Manager (Labs Category) at University of Edinburgh said, “We are delighted to have won this award. It is testament to the valuable partnerships we have with high-quality lab suppliers to make sure we’re getting the best access to products for our research. It also highlights the importance of the work that staff, working in our research stores, are doing behind the scenes and how their work is contributing to reducing the environmental impact of our research activities.”

Commenting on the awards, Rob Holmes, Helix Channel Manager at Promega UK said, “Helix has been available to our customers for a number of years in the UK. However, over the last 18 months we’ve realised that as well as convenience and accessibility; the cabinets, fridges and freezers also offer our customers across the public and private sectors the opportunity to save organisational time and money as well as helping the environment. For any organisation trying to maintain the same levels of research with budgets under pressure – that’s really important.”