Alan Baines, director, Testing Solutions at Lonza BioScience explains how automated systems are improving every aspect of endotoxin testing workflows.
Improved Working
Endotoxin testing is an important quality control (QC) measure that is used across the medical and bioscience sectors to ensure the safety of parenteral drugs, medical devices and other raw material products that are used in these markets. A range of methods are employed by QC laboratories to perform endotoxin testing, including the limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) test and the recombinant factor C (rFC) assay.
Given the large volume of samples that must be processed by QC laboratories, endotoxin testing workflows must be fast and effective to avoid costly delays in the manufacture and release of products. However, with patient safety dependent on the quality of data generated by these routine tests, the need for speed and efficiency must not come at the expense of measurement accuracy. Regardless of the type of assay used for endotoxin testing, these workflows typically involve multiple liquid handling and data transfer steps for a large number of samples, which must be performed reliably, consistently and with the utmost precision.