Automation of activity determination increases speed of product checks at Aspen

The pharmaceutical company Aspen Oss produces Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs). One of these is heparin, a drug used to prevent or treat blood clots. Thanks to lab automation, the company is able to speed up activity determinations during product checks.

During the Lab Automation event, on March 26 in 1931 in the Congress Center Den Bosch, scientific lab technician Hendrik Willem Hoogewerf give a lecture about the process of automating the activity determination. Up until about a year ago, some steps in the activity determination of heparin, which comes from pig intestinal mucus, were done manually: “Our analysts lost up to twenty minutes on manual pipetting. Because the process has to take place at fixed times, it is very beneficial to automate. That removes all variation,” says Hoogewerf.

He describes the new, automated method: “We offer our samples as a liquid. These samples are diluted by the robot. Then the samples are placed on a microplate. This plate is transported to a mixer. And on that mixer we add four different reagents with a head with 96 points. It was precisely that part of the process that analysts still had to do by hand and cut up into eight different steps. With the robot you can do this much faster.”

But there is more to gain than just time savings, says Hoogewerf: “The throughput of the number of samples also increases. And you relieve the burden on the analysts in the laboratory.”

Rapid implementation

The automated system has been in use by Aspen Oss for a year now. Before the company made a choice, it also consulted sister companies. “The orientation phase went quite quickly,” says Hoogewerf. “We visited several suppliers for a demonstration. We had to get the feeling that we could implement such a system quickly and adjust it if necessary.”

He continues: “There were two suppliers left that we visited several times to assess their systems and look at further possibilities. When we had chosen the supplier, in our case Tecan, they showed us again that our entire process can be carried out.”

During his lecture, Hoogewerf will go into more detail about all the steps that were taken to introduce this system, but he still wants to give a tip: “It can help you a lot to look closely at what is happening at other companies. And for processes that seem completely normal, you still have to set up criteria.”

You can attend Hendrik Willem Hoogewerf's lecture free of charge. You can register register here for the Lab Automation event.