Strand Life Sciences handles some of the country’s most demanding genomics workflows across rare disease testing, reproductive health, and oncology. Much of this work depends on whole-exome sequencing (WES), where extraction quality and turnaround time directly affect everything downstream.

As sample volumes grew, extraction started becoming a bottleneck.

The lab was processing 500-1000 samples every week across blood, tissue, prenatal, and chorionic villi samples. But the extraction workflow was still largely manual. Processing 96 samples took nearly 2-3 days and required 2-3 technicians working continuously through the process.

At that scale, manual extraction was no longer just labour-intensive - it was difficult to sustain operationally.

“Earlier, 96 samples would take us 2-3 days with 2-3 resources working every day,” says Sameer Phalke, Director, Lab Sciences at Strand Life Sciences.

For a high-throughput WES lab, delays at extraction do not stay isolated. Slower sample processing affects library preparation schedules, sequencing timelines, reporting timelines, and overall workflow planning. The challenge was clear: increase throughput without continuously increasing manpower alongside it.

To solve this, Strand integrated two Manta systems into their extraction workflow.

The difference was immediate. Instead of stretching 96 samples across multiple days, the team could now run three batches of 32 samples and process more than 150 samples per day using the same set of resources.

“With Manta, we can run three batches of 32 samples and process more than 150 samples per day with the same resources,” says Sameer Phalke.

The workflow became easier to manage at scale. Turnaround times reduced. Failures reduced. Most importantly, extraction stopped limiting how quickly the lab could move samples into sequencing.

Before automation, the lab’s effective daily throughput ranged between approximately 32–48 samples per day. With Manta, that increased to more than 150 samples daily - an extraction throughput increase of up to 263%.

But for Strand, the impact was larger than throughput numbers alone. The workflow became more predictable. Teams spent less time managing extraction delays and repeat processing. Sequencing operations became easier to plan around.

“Turnaround time has gone down, and failures have gone down,” says Sameer Phalke.

Why extraction throughput matters in WES labs

In high-throughput genomics labs, extraction is often treated as a routine upstream step. But in reality, extraction throughput directly influences how efficiently the entire sequencing pipeline operates.

For WES workflows, delays during extraction can affect library preparation schedules, sequencing runs, reporting timelines, and overall lab predictability. As sample volumes grow, even small inefficiencies at the extraction stage compound quickly across the workflow.

This becomes especially important in applications such as:

• Rare disease testing, where faster movement into sequencing can support shorter diagnostic timelines

• Reproductive health workflows, where prenatal and chorionic villi samples require reliable and consistent processing

• Oncology sequencing, where tissue and blood samples demand dependable extraction quality for downstream analysis

• High-volume lab operations, where reducing failures and repeat processing improves both efficiency and resource utilization

For Strand Life Sciences, improving extraction throughput was not simply about processing more samples. It was about building a sequencing workflow that could scale reliably while remaining operationally manageable for the team running it every day.