Toxicology
Toxicology testing covers a broad array of chemicals important to human health that range from pesticides to household cleaners. Other important test areas include drugs of abuse, Absorption/Administration, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion/Elimination and Toxicity (ADMET), and forensic toxicology. Solid Phase Extraction (SPE) is a widely used method for many toxicology applications.
ADMET studies are a critical group of predictive assays for measuring drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics utilizing in vivo and in vitro technologies. ADME screening of candidate compounds is key to the drug development process, saving both time and money by determining dosage and toxicity issues for new drugs before human trials. ADMET assays are also widely used for lead optimization and include solubility, PAMPA (Parallel Artificial Membrane Permeability Analysis), CaCo-2 (permeability), and microsomal (metabolism) analysis. The assays are often divided into two groups - physicochemical measurements (e.g., solubility) and cell-based (e.g., CaCo2, microsomes) methods.
Toxicology assays gain tremendous benefits from automated liquid handling workstations because they can handle both aqueous and organic solvents. Compound distribution can be measured across transwell plates or special PAMPA filter plates or across organic and aqueous phases. For cell-based analysis, sample preparation is followed by shaking incubation and then lysis. Bulk (microsomal) or compartmental (CaCo2) compound concentrations are determined by UV spectroscopy or LC-MS analysis. Thus, shaking incubator and reader integrations are often needed for ADMET workstations.
Including a JANUS® automated workstation into your laboratory processes will foster greater confidence in test data, faster delivery of the results and a more thorough analysis and evaluation of experimental parameters, important to toxicology assays compared to manual operation. Our family of liquid handling workstations provides reliable increases in throughput and reduces errors common to manual and labor-intensive methods.
Common applications include:
Summary of features and benefits
Working with a technology leader affords you several benefits.
- Flexible platforms ensure increased throughput
- Modular and scalable design allows you to integrate existing instruments and add processes
- Standard and custom workstation configurations – choose a single or multiple workstations
- Robust portfolio of automation and detection instruments, with proven application solutions
- Analytical tools for samples tracking and post analysis cherry picking
- Access to cutting-edge development of new processes for industry and academic research
- Worldwide service and support