Fraction collector for micro parallel liquid chromatography system outputs collected fractions for each eluent at fixed time intervals across all 24 channels to SBS-standard plates
Nanostream, a provider of high-throughput microfluidic analytical systems to companies involved in drug discovery and development, announces a fraction collector add-on to the Veloce micro parallel liquid chromatography system.
The addition of a parallel, time-triggered fraction collector facilitates the use of the Veloce system as a front-end sample preparation system for drug metabolism, pharmacokinetic assays and other bioanalytical applications.
The Veloce system, used in conjunction with a 24-column Brio cartridge, performs 24 analytical separations simultaneously and significantly decreases the sample-to-result time for researchers.
Based on customer requests for an interface to mass spectrometry (MS), Nanostream designed the fraction collector add-on for users to accelerate routine assays that require MS, MS/MS or alternate modes of detection.
Applications that would benefit from the Veloce system with fraction collection include metabolic stability assays, pharmacokinetic profiling, drug-drug interaction studies and bioavailability studies.
These studies, which are performed to characterise absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (Adme) properties of potential drugs, are typically performed in later stages of drug discovery.
The fraction collector add-on is said to be ideal for scientists who need to accelerate sample preparation and increase analysis capacity without incurring additional resource and capital equipment costs.
The fraction collector add-on enables users to take the separation offline and increase analytical throughput for chromatographic preparation of samples.
By decoupling the chromatography from detection and quantitation, scientists will be able to fully utilise existing MS instrumentation and thereby rapidly perform routine MS screening.
"It is well known that poor Adme properties are responsible for a large portion of attrition among drug candidates.
"Adme studies, specifically drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic profiling, have emerged as a major bottleneck for pharmaceutical organisations, and there is a major push to move these kinds of studies earlier in the drug discovery process," said Surekha Vajjhala, director of marketing, Nanostream.
"Our solution helps to overcome this bottleneck by increasing analytical throughput and, by doing so, offers a path to moving these studies to earlier stages of drug discovery".
The fraction collector outputs collected fractions for each eluent at fixed time intervals across all 24 channels to SBS-standard plates.
This convenient format affords users flexibility in their selection of subsequent modes of detection, which may depend on the specific requirements of the assay.
Designed to permit unattended operation and ease-of-use, the software-controlled fraction collector incorporates an integrated plate changing system with the capacity to transfer up to 70 plates, a dedicated rinse station for passive and active rinsing of the needles, and user-defined collection windows based on specified retention times.
The fraction collector joins the Veloce system suite of product add-ons developed to provide a comprehensive solution for a wide range of drug discovery applications.
Nanostream continues to focus on demonstrating discovery analytical and Adme applications with the Veloce system so that customers can use the system as a single platform to measure many properties and characteristics of potential drugs.
