The Automation Partnership (TAP), a world leader in the design and development of innovative automation for life science applications, 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 which will help 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, which has been 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. Within a couple of weeks of signing-off, the system is already making a significant impact. The bespoke protein purification system we delivered has a very straightforward user interface and also 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 which means columns can be regenerated for multiple use. It is this pragmatic eye for details and focus on a simple practical solution to customer’s real needs that makes TAP’s Advanced Projects Group 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.”