Accuri Cytometers Inc, a life sciences company manufacturing and marketing revolutionary bench-top flow cytometer systems, today announced the sale of the 500th unit of its Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer® System and the 2010 recipients of its Accuri Cytometers Creativity Awards program, which provides a free Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer to researchers in the US and Europe who design highly innovative uses of flow cytometry. Explicitly designed for routine use by biomedical researchers in their own labs, Accuri’s flow cytometer is a full-featured bench-top cell analysis system that provides powerful capabilities similar to industry-leading flow cytometers in a user-friendly format and at a fraction of the cost.

The 2010 Accuri Flow Cytometer Creativity Award winners include research teams at Iowa State University’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition and Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center’s Department of Hematology in the Netherlands. Accuri’s Creativity Award program is designed to foster innovative research that taps the unrealized potential of flow cytometry and expands its use to novel applications.

Jeffrey Williams, Accuri president and CEO, commented: “I want to congratulate the two talented research groups who have been selected as recipients of the Accuri Cytometers 2010 Creativity Award and the entire worldwide Accuri team for achieving this major sales milestone just two years after the launch of the Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer System. The Accuri C6 continues to receive outstanding acceptance in the marketplace, as a rapidly expanding number of scientists worldwide discover the benefits of round-the-clock access to high performance flow cytometry. We look forward to reporting on further innovative uses as our growing customer base applies the power and versatility of the Accuri C6 to both traditional and novel applications.”

Accuri designed the C6 system from the ground up with input from hundreds of researchers. Accuri’s innovations, coupled with its state-of-the-art components, resulted in a cytometer that is powerful, robust, compact, easy-to-use and very affordable, at less than one-third the price of other market-leading flow cytometers and one-tenth the operating costs of the market leaders over five years of ownership.

“Our newest Accuri Cytometer Creativity Award winners will soon discover for themselves the mix of performance, versatility and ease-of-use that have made the Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer System such a success in just two years on the market in the US, with more recent launches in Europe and Asia,” noted Jack Ball, Chief Commercial Officer at Accuri. “The rapid sale of more than 500 units worldwide is testament to the outstanding performance and value delivered by the C6, the unmet demand from scientists for greater access to high quality flow cytometry and the talent and dedication of the Accuri sales and support team, who have hosted on-site demonstrations for hundreds of scientists. In these demonstrations we proved that along with its lower price and smaller footprint, the Accuri C6 produces equivalent data to that of the market leaders. It is also so easy to use that most scientists at the demonstration were running their own samples and analyzing data after just a few minutes—an amazing result in a field previously known for its complexity. As we continue to ramp up our global presence, we have great expectations for what one of our many satisfied customers calls our ‘little cytometer that could’.”

The rapid acceptance of the Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer in the marketplace reflects user experiences such as those reported by Steve McClellan, senior biological scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR), Flow Cytometry Core Laboratory of the University of Florida, who commented, “The Accuri C6 is a transformative product, providing high performance flow cytometry in an affordable, easy-to-use format that makes it accessible to almost all researchers. And the story gets even better. In recent toxicity studies that relied on the system’s uniquely wide dynamic range, our lab was able to conduct experiments that previously had not been successful using a traditional cytometer available in our core facility. Affordable and accessible, and with improved capabilities too!”