TAP delivers customized automated protein purification system in collaboration with a European major

Nov 24 2009

The Automation Partnership (TAP), a world leader in the design and development of innovative automation for life science applications, today announced its Advanced Projects Group has successfully collaborated with a major European antibody therapeutics company to deliver a custom automated protein purification and concentration system helping the company accelerate its pre-clinical 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, whilst decreasing labour and significantly 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, 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, the Business Development Manager for TAP’s Advanced Projects’ Group stated: “The group approached us because their major pharma parent had collaborated with TAP and knew we had the capability to design systems which work to their rigorous specifications. The bespoke protein purification system has a very straightforward user interface and includes some clever 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, meaning columns can be regenerated for multiple use. It is this pragmatic eye for details and focus on a simple practical solution to customer’s needs that makes TAP’s Advanced Projects Group such an excellent partner to work with.”

Nick Cooke, TAP’s COO and Head of the Advanced Projects Group 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.”