Automation Partnership provides European biotech with protein purification system

The Automation Partnership (TAP), based in Royston, Hertfordshire, UK, a specialist in the development of automation for life science applications, has collaborated with a European antibody therapeutics company to develop a proprietary automated protein purification and concentration system, which has helped the company accelerate its pre-clinical research.

The company's Advanced Projects Group has installed and tested the system, which it says can produce equivalent protein yields to the manual protein processes used previously, while decreasing labour-intensive tasks and significantly increasing the number of proteins available for analysis.

The system purifies recombinant proteins from a 50ml sample lysate and includes automated purification through affinity chromatography, buffer exchange, and then protein concentration. It automatically refrigerates samples overnight, or over a weekend, to maintain quality and allow processing outside working hours. In addition, the system performs two runs every 24 hours, each providing 48 high quality bioassay ready protein samples.

"The bespoke protein purification system has a very straightforward user interface and includes some clever cost saving features," said Dr Richard Wales, business development manager for TAP's Advanced Projects Group. "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."

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."