Description
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.”
To find out more about Tecan’s AC Extraction Plate, visit www.tecan.com/acplate
