December 17, 2009
Peptides play a key role in the growing segment of biopharmaceuticals. Used in small quantities, bottling takes a lab technician a lot of time and overfilling can be very costly. The combination of QUANTOS with an auto sampler offers the ideal solution to the bottling problem: once the substance to be filled is loaded into the QUANTOS dosing head, 30 target vessels can be dosed with highest accuracy without user interaction, even with different target weights.
Peptides play a key role in the growing segment of biopharmaceuticals. Dosing such small quantities takes a lab technician a lot of time. The combination of QUANTOS with an auto sampler offers an ideal solution to the bottling problem: once the substance to be filled is loaded into the QUANTOS dosing head, 30 target vessels can be dosed without user interaction, even with different target weights.
Peptides play a key role in the growing segment of biopharmaceuticals. Peptide-based drug targets are being
identified at an increasingly rapid pace and a variety of new peptide drugs are being developed as novel therapies for cancer, pain treatment, viral infections, diabetes and a host of endocrine and neurological disorders. The logistics group within a leading Swiss biochemical company with many years experience in manufacturing and selling peptides and other complex organic molecules to the pharma and biotech industries, have the task of managing the supply of a series of peptides and proteins from the 4400 biochemicals in their catalog. Many chemical substances, (including peptides and proteins) can be expensive, as they require multi-step syntheses. The chemical companies producing those substances sell them in small quantities, ranging from 1 mg to several 100 mg. These samples are usually dosed manually with a spatula from a single source container to a batch at a fixed target weight.
Dosing such small quantities takes a lab technician a lot of time, usually in the range of 2 to 3 minutes per filling. rom one production batch, usually 30 to 100, sometimes up to 1000 units are filled, which again is a very tiring task for the operator.
An operator, who has to fill vials for 1 to 5 hours, may also suffer from loss of concentration, which leads to errors, e.g. samples that are out of specification. It is important that a vial is not underfilled, which means that it must not contain less than the specified amount of powder. EU Regulation 76/211/EWG for filling states that the actual mass of the contents of a flask can vary to maximum 9% compared to the written label‘.
Challenge
The biggest challenge in this application is to address the tedious manual task of repetitive filling of the same small amount of substance to many target vials. The customer needed to enhance their productivity and speed up this process to meet customer demand. Additionally, costs from overdosing are a problem for manufacturers, as they are effectively giving a proportion of their substance away for free.
The solution with QUANTOS
The combination of QUANTOS with an auto sampler offers an ideal solution to the bottling problem: once the substance to be filled is loaded into the QUANTOS dosing head, 30 target vessels can be dosed without user interaction, even with different target weights. The system takes approx. 30 to 60 seconds per vessel, which is approx. 4 times faster than manual filling. Using the automatically generated labels simplifies the logistical track that the vial will take. In order to fit the target bottle perfectly to the autosampler and to reduce electrostatic effects, a range of vial adapters are available.
Return-on-Investment
Since the QUANTOS systems have been installed for this application (one year ago), productivity has been enhanced more than 4-fold. Additionally, savings have been made from dosing to an accuracy of 2%, as opposed to overfilling by 9% of the desired sample weight.
Conclusion
This customer is delighted with the performance of both the QUANTOS QB1 and QUANTOS QS30 with auto sampler for filling/bottling applications, and the impact these automated systems have made on the productivity and savings in their workflow.
Equally, the QUANTOS technology can be applied to any bottlers and distributors of fine chemicals, reference materials and standards who are involved with repetitive manual dispensing of substances in the range 1mg - 250mg, and who are interested in enhancing their productivity and saving money on costly and unnecessary overfilling of samples.
Peptides play a key role in the growing segment of biopharmaceuticals. Peptide-based drug targets are being
identified at an increasingly rapid pace and a variety of new peptide drugs are being developed as novel therapies for cancer, pain treatment, viral infections, diabetes and a host of endocrine and neurological disorders. The logistics group within a leading Swiss biochemical company with many years experience in manufacturing and selling peptides and other complex organic molecules to the pharma and biotech industries, have the task of managing the supply of a series of peptides and proteins from the 4400 biochemicals in their catalog. Many chemical substances, (including peptides and proteins) can be expensive, as they require multi-step syntheses. The chemical companies producing those substances sell them in small quantities, ranging from 1 mg to several 100 mg. These samples are usually dosed manually with a spatula from a single source container to a batch at a fixed target weight.Dosing such small quantities takes a lab technician a lot of time, usually in the range of 2 to 3 minutes per filling. rom one production batch, usually 30 to 100, sometimes up to 1000 units are filled, which again is a very tiring task for the operator.
An operator, who has to fill vials for 1 to 5 hours, may also suffer from loss of concentration, which leads to errors, e.g. samples that are out of specification. It is important that a vial is not underfilled, which means that it must not contain less than the specified amount of powder. EU Regulation 76/211/EWG for filling states that the actual mass of the contents of a flask can vary to maximum 9% compared to the written label‘.
Challenge
The biggest challenge in this application is to address the tedious manual task of repetitive filling of the same small amount of substance to many target vials. The customer needed to enhance their productivity and speed up this process to meet customer demand. Additionally, costs from overdosing are a problem for manufacturers, as they are effectively giving a proportion of their substance away for free.
The solution with QUANTOS
The combination of QUANTOS with an auto sampler offers an ideal solution to the bottling problem: once the substance to be filled is loaded into the QUANTOS dosing head, 30 target vessels can be dosed without user interaction, even with different target weights. The system takes approx. 30 to 60 seconds per vessel, which is approx. 4 times faster than manual filling. Using the automatically generated labels simplifies the logistical track that the vial will take. In order to fit the target bottle perfectly to the autosampler and to reduce electrostatic effects, a range of vial adapters are available.
Return-on-Investment
Since the QUANTOS systems have been installed for this application (one year ago), productivity has been enhanced more than 4-fold. Additionally, savings have been made from dosing to an accuracy of 2%, as opposed to overfilling by 9% of the desired sample weight.
- Annual consumable costs = 2.530,00 €
- Net investment costs = 49.000,00 €
- Total annual gross savings = 62.968,85 €
- Net savings in 5 years = 252.494,26 €
Conclusion
This customer is delighted with the performance of both the QUANTOS QB1 and QUANTOS QS30 with auto sampler for filling/bottling applications, and the impact these automated systems have made on the productivity and savings in their workflow.
Equally, the QUANTOS technology can be applied to any bottlers and distributors of fine chemicals, reference materials and standards who are involved with repetitive manual dispensing of substances in the range 1mg - 250mg, and who are interested in enhancing their productivity and saving money on costly and unnecessary overfilling of samples.
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