Astec Co., Ltd. and Nature’s SAFE form corporate partnership

Established in 1978, Astec Bio designs, manufactures, and sells state-of-the-art medical laboratory equipment for the Assisted Reproductive Industry worldwide. For over 45 years, Astec has been a dependable partner for universities, institutes, research laboratories, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies where science has been making a perceptible difference to build a better future for all.

Nature’s SAFE is one of Europe’s largest dedicated facilities capable of the long-term storage of live cells from animal species that are at the greatest risk of extinction.

Together we will be incubating the future.

Nature’s SAFE is working with leading reproductive scientists and cryobiologists to actively collect a wide range of animal tissue, cell and gonadal specimens, predominantly donated by our expanding network of zoo partners. Our scientists are currently developing protocols that focus on culturing cell lines recovered from these tissues with a view to cryopreservation for future use that can ultimately regenerate species.

Incubators donated by Astec Co.,Ltd. will be used primarily for cell culture, oocyte maturation and embryo culture from a wide variety of species, many of which are critically endangered or even at the point of extinction. Having the ability to separate the various cultures between the incubators is vital to maintain a safe and biologically secure environment for the many taxa and cell types being preserved in parallel. The incubators will also enable us to scale up our operations considerably, providing an opportunity to conserve more species in a shorter space of time and help us to develop optimised protocols for cryopreservation much faster than we would otherwise be able to.

Time is of the essence to protect as many species as possible, as quickly as possible, and the Astec incubators play an integral role in helping us to achieve this goal.

You can visit Astec at https://www.astec-bio.com/global/about/