Piston-driven automated liquid handlers

Laboratory capacities are often limited by time-consuming manual repetitive procedures rather than analysis time itself. While modern instruments are typically equipped with an autosampler, sample preparation often follows manual procedures including many labor-intensive, monotonous tasks. Particularly, for a high number of samples, well plates, and low microliter pipetting, manual preparation is error-prone often requiring repeated experiments. Sampling and sample preparation can account for greater analytical variability than instrument analysis. Repetitive tasks such as liquid handling benefit strongly from technological advances and led to the increasing applications of various automated liquid handlers (ALHs). In this review, we discuss the considerations for ALHs in the microliter range and highlight advantages and challenges when transforming from manual to automated workflows. We strongly focused on differences in liquid handling and outlined advantages due to sensor-controlled pipetting. ALHs can substantially improve costs-effectiveness and laboratory capacity. This is a consequence of increased efficiency, and throughput of laboratories while simultaneously raising data quality. Additionally, ALHs can improve safety, documentation of data, and sustainability. While automation requires careful consideration and resource demanding implementation, we believe it offers numerous advantages and can help to transform modern laboratories.

Clinical Laboratory Automation: A Case Study

Background

This paper presents a case study of an automated clinical laboratory in a large urban academic teaching hospital in the North of Italy, the Spedali Civili in Brescia, where four laboratories were merged in a unique laboratory through the introduction of laboratory automation.

Materials and Methods

The analysis compares the preautomation situation and the new setting from a cost perspective, by considering direct and indirect costs. It also presents an analysis of the turnaround time (TAT). The study considers equipment, staff and indirect costs.

Results

The introduction of automation led to a slight increase in equipment costs which is highly compensated by a remarkable decrease in staff costs. Consequently, total costs decreased by 12.55%. The analysis of the TAT shows an improvement of nonemergency exams while emergency exams are still validated within the maximum time imposed by the hospital.

Conclusions

The strategy adopted by the management, which was based on re-using the available equipment and staff when merging the pre-existing laboratories, has reached its goal: introducing automation while minimizing the costs.

A simple, effective approach for rapid development of high-throughput and reliable LC-MS/MS bioanalytical assays

BACKGROUND

Rapidly developing LC-MS/MS assays with high-throughput and quality are challenging yet desired. Methodology & results: A simple method development approach was reported and demonstrated with the quantitative bioanalysis of BMS-984478, a hepatitis C virus nonstructural protein 5A inhibitor. An accurate, precise and robust LC-MS/MS method for the quantitation of BMS-984478 in rat and monkey plasma was developed and validated. Incurred sample reanalysis evaluation passed with 100% of samples meeting the acceptance criteria. The validated assay was successfully applied in toxicology studies without any failed runs.

CONCLUSION

The approach was successfully applied to the bioanalysis of BMS-984478 in toxicology and clinical studies. This approach was shown to be effective and reliable in speeding the development of high-throughput and reliable LC-MS/MS assays.

Small-molecule bioanalytical sample preparation method development starting from the BASICS

Aim: To develop a robust small-molecule bioanalytical sample preparation method, systematic investigations of the bioanalytical handling conditions of analytes and IS of interest are preferred. So far, such investigations are done manually and are labor-intensive and error-prone. Result: An automation-assisted system has been developed to facilitate such systematic investigations. The system takes experimental design and automates the majority of the wet laboratory work. In addition, the system also automates the data extraction, recovery/loss computation, graphing and reporting. Conclusion: The automation-assisted system greatly reduces errors and labor involved in the systematic investigation of analytes and IS both for wet chemistry experiments and for data extraction and processing, enhances data processing efficiency and overall sample preparation method development productivity.

Dried blood spot analysis without dilution: Application to the LC-MS/MS determination of BMS-986001 in rat dried blood spot

Sample dilution is one major challenge in dried blood spot (DBS) bioanalysis. To resolve this issue, we applied a no-dilution strategy for DBS analysis by using a calibration curve with very wide linear range. We developed an LC-MS/MS DBS assay with a linear range of 5 orders of magnitude (50-5000,000ng/mL) for BMS-986001, an HIV drug under development, by simultaneously monitoring two selective reaction monitoring transitions of different intensity. The assay was validated and successfully applied to the analysis of DBS samples collected in a toxicology study in rats dosed with BMS-986001. All samples were analyzed without any dilution. We also compared the concentration data generated from the DBS method and a validated plasma assay for the same study. The two sets of data agreed well with each other, demonstrating the validity of this strategy for DBS analysis. This approach provides an effective and convenient way to eliminate complicated dilution for DBS and other sample collection techniques.