Tecan’s AC Extraction Plate™ Boosts Productivity for Clozapine Testing at King’s College Hospital

21 Oct 2014

Product news

King’s College Hospital, London, has established a fully automated therapeutic drug monitoring protocol for clozapine using Tecan’s AC Extraction Plate™ and Freedom EVO® liquid handling platform.

Lewis Couchman, Senior Clinical Scientist (Clinical Biochemistry Laboratory and Toxicology Department), explained: “We perform about 30,000 tests a year for clozapine, preparing the samples manually by liquid-liquid extraction. We wanted to automate the analytical process, making it more rapid and robust, and less prone to human error – as well as reducing costs and providing the capacity to grow the service – and the AC Extraction Plate and Freedom EVO have the potential to make a real difference to our workflow.”

“Currently, samples arriving at the laboratory by 1 pm are manually extracted during the afternoon, run overnight, and the results reported the following day. The Freedom EVO can prepare a whole AC Extraction Plate in around 30 minutes, followed directly by LC-MS analysis, with a runtime of just under four minutes a sample. We have compared around 500 samples prepared manually and using the automated method, and are really impressed with the results; there is no discrepancy between the two methods. We are in the final stages of the evaluation phase, but everybody is excited at the prospect of seeing it implemented.”

AC Extraction Plate™

Tecan

The Tecan AC Extraction Plate* with TICE™ (Tecan Immobilized Coating Extraction) technology revolutionizes your sample preparation routine. The AC Extraction Plate is a 96-well, deep-well microplate, with each well having a proprietary TICE™ coating. TICE is a material with distinct absorptive properties, and this coating efficiently extracts specific small molecule analytes from aqueous solutions, releasing them when in contact with a suitable organic solvent. A simple pipette and shake sequence, with no filtration, centrifugation or solvent evaporation, is all that is required. The AC Extraction Plate is easily integrated into automated processes, making it a perfect match with Tecan’s Freedom EVO® liquid handling platform. AC Extraction Plate™ Features: Cost-effective – Simple pipette and shake workflow, without labor intensive centrifugation, filtration and solvent evaporation steps. Convenient and fast – Just unpack and start, no conditioning or other preparations needed. Highly reproducible – Pipette and shake routines are easily standardized and automated on a liquid handling platform, eliminating random errors and increasing consistency of results. * For research use only – not for clinical diagnostic applications

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