Equipment manufacturer Waters is using software to simplify technology and reduce lifetime running costs for bioprocessing. That’s according to Nick Pittman, global marketing manager for biopharmaceuticals at Waters, who recently spoke at PEGS Europe.
Waters added Wyatt Technology’s light scattering instruments to their portfolio last year. According to Pittman, the company is now integrating software control of their Multi Angle Light Scattering (MALS) detection on their liquid chromatography (LC) systems.
“We’re the only company I’m aware of who offers both these technologies in our portfolio, and bringing them together is exciting for us,” he says. “But the big step forward is bringing these analytical technologies under one software umbrella, Empower, and that’s what we’re working on at the moment.”
According to Pittman, combining LC-MS and MALS can help process developers and manufacturers improve their analytics. LC-MS can help assess product identity, purity, and mispairing between, for example, component parts of multi-specific antibodies. MALS is also able to measure, for example, the protein concentration of a sample.
Potential applications in bioprocessing include understanding protein interactions and glycosylation, as well as at-line analyses of product quality, cell culture media, and metabolites to inform feed strategies.
Yet, typically, he explains, using an LC system and MALS detection together would require two sets of software for running experiments and analyzing the results. However, running LC-MALS under a single software package can bring benefits in regulated environments, including multi-specific manufacture, he points out, including reducing costs for manufacturers by improving ease-of-use and the robustness of the technology.
“It requires less staff training and also allows for more analytics, of course,” Pittman says. “The cost of any system over its lifetime is more than simply the purchase cost, and by needing fewer skilled operators, you can ensure [the equipment] has as much uptime as possible.”
In the future, Waters plans to bring MALS under Empower control for further integration with other analytical techniques.
