CASY technology is an electric field multi-channel cell counting system.
In 2006, Schärfe System was acquired by Innovatis AG, a company focused on cell culture analysis.
CASY utilizes the techniques of electric current exclusion and pulse area analysis, the cells can be analyzed and counted in an efficient and precise manner.
As a result, when cells in an electrolyte or a particular buffer, they are aligned one by one to a precision measuring pore and exposed to the electric field, each of their information can be captured and the culture condition, including its concentration, viability and volume, can be analyzed.
This advantage permits subsequent tests using the cells such as viability after a further time interval.
As a result, the speed of CASY technology to obtain the information of cells can be very high.
Lindl et al. (2005) [2] has compared the CASY technology to two standard methods for cell viability measurement, including the neutral red uptake and MTT assay.
They found that the most sensitive IC50 values, which were the closest to those in the literature, were performed by this electronic cell counter.
On the other hand, all the results from electric cell counter could be transferred to the computers with common spreadsheet programs.
However, the difference between them is that there is an aperture called “sensing zone”, with a known volume of electrolyte in a coulter counter.
When suspended cells pass through it, they would displace the equivalent volume of electrolyte in the sensing zone and cause a short term change of electric current across the aperture.