The Automation Partnership's (TAP's) Advanced Projects Group has collaborated with a European antibody therapeutics company to deliver a custom automated protein purification and concentration system.
This is intended to help the antibody therapeutics company accelerate its preclinical research.
The automated protein purification system has already been installed and tested and can produce equivalent protein yields to the manual protein processes used previously, while decreasing labour and increasing the number of proteins available for analysis.
Researchers at the company no longer need to manually purify proteins and spend hours centrifuging concentration devices to collect protein, as these labour-intensive tasks have been fully automated within the protein purification system.
The walk-away system, which has been designed to purify recombinant proteins from a 50ml sample lysate, includes automated purification via affinity chromatography, buffer exchange and then protein concentration.
The system automatically refrigerates samples overnight, or over the weekend, to maintain quality and allow processing outside working hours.
Designed to fit this laboratory's workflow, the system performs two runs every 24 hours, each providing 48 high-quality bioassay-ready protein samples.
Dr Richard Wales, business development manager for TAP's Advanced Projects Group, said: 'The bespoke protein purification system we delivered has a very straightforward user interface and also includes some cost-saving features.
'For example, we added three waste units so expensive waste is kept to a minimum.
'Also, the rack of purification columns can be removed, which means columns can be regenerated for multiple use,' he added.
'This custom automation system can be readily adapted to fit other similar applications and TAP is already talking to other companies with highly intensive protein purification activities to discuss variants of the system that would unblock their bottlenecks,' said Nick Cooke, TAP's chief operating officer and head of the Advanced Projects Group.
