Copley Scientific has released a new Waste Shot Collector (dubbed WSC2). It is designed to capture the waste doses produced during inhaler testing. The European Pharmacopoeia (EP) and United States Pharmacopeia (USP) state that both metered-dose and powder dose inhalers (MDIs and PDIs) should be tested to ensure the dose is uniform over the entire contents of the device. This normally involves collecting several doses at different stages of the inhaler's lifetimes.
According to Copley: "All other doses are fired to waste, conventionally into a fume cupboard or ventilated enclosure with appropriate drug capture facilities."
The WSC2 is designed to apply the same conditions during firing to waste that are applied during testing, which Copley believes will improve test consistency. The equipment itself is small enough to sit on the lab bench and is powered by laboratory compressed air.
Uniqsis is marching towards the release of its first product, FlowSyn. The company, based in Cambridge, UK, was only formed in January 2007 in order to develop 'a new concept' in microreaction flow chemistry.
Martyn Fordham, CEO at Uniqsis, said: "Development of FlowSyn, our new fully integrated flow reaction platform, is entering its final phase. Pre-production units are already undergoing evaluation in-house and in several pharmaceutical and academic laboratories around the UK."
The machine is expected to be unveiled in October. The company has also now employed Dr Otman Benali from GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) technology development department.
He said: "Micro reactors have distinct advantages over batch processes. They offer improved mixing and heat transfer which leads to excellent reproducibility. Scale-up becomes much easier, with less re-optimisation, and fewer problems with unstable intermediates or highly exothermic reactions. It's also easier to add additional features such as on-line analysis or pressurization."
He added that although most fine chemical companies were aware of these benefits when he joined GSK in 2002, at that time there was no suitable commercial instrumentation available.
Another Cambridge-based company, Q Chip, has released the MicroPlant, a microfluidics-based device which lets scientists place aqueous molecular biology reagents within re-dissolvable polymer microspheres. The technology can be licensed from Q Chip, but the company also offers a custom encapsulation service.
It believes the product is superior to conventional reagent lyophilisation because of its ultra-low wastage (important as the reagents are often expensive), uniform dosing and morphology (to ensure reproducibility), and low process costs. The tool has a number of molecular biology uses, including real-time PCR and viral-load quantification.
Another advantage, claims Q Chip, is that the MicroPlant is very flexible in terms of its operating temperature; each encapsulation procedure can be performed under temperatures from -30 to 200 degrees centigrade, although it admits in the context of molecular reagents, temperatures of five to 37 degrees centigrade are most applicable. The tool can also produce batches varying in size from 1000 beads up to 15 million x 96 well plates annually.
Meanwhile, life sciences equipment and services company Applied Biosytems, has released a new real-time PCR system. The Step One Plus uses fluorophore detection to perform both standard and fast thermal cycling for any real-time PCR application, such as gene expression analysis, SNP genotyping, gene detection and viral load analysis.
The bundled software can be tailored to run specific experiments, and experiment design parameters such as thermo cycling protocols and nucleic acid template types can also be customised, according to the company.
