Biopharmaceutical Manufacture in Miniature

The Biomolecular Separation Engineering group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, is using the Tecan Freedom EVO® liquid handling workstation, equipped with the Te-Chrom™ module and Atoll’s 96-array MediaScout® RoboColumn system, to create a fully automated chromatography platform for biopharmaceutical process development. Professor Jürgen Hubbuch explained the team’s research strategy: “We are

using automation to help us learn as much as possible about processes before synthesis and scale-up, aiming to significantly enhance process performance and reduce production costs. Tecan’s Freedom EVO workstations offer unrivalled flexibility for integration of new hardware components developed in-house, and a very high level of space on the deck of the instrument.”

“One of the main tasks performed on our Freedom EVO workstations is assessing chromatographic separations of new biopharmaceuticals using Atoll’s 96-array MediaScout RoboColumns. The combined Tecan/Atoll solution allows us to generate a large amount of data within a short time frame, and automation permits us, for the first time, to exploit Design of Experiment (DoE) strategies, combining short experimental time and low material consumption. This not only cuts the development time for process optimisation significantly, but also gives a much better understanding of the process”.