World’s First System Fully Automated Sample Preparation Module for LC-MS

Shimadzu, one of the world leaders in analytical instrumentation, has released a new and unique fully automated sample preparation module (RUO) connected online for LC-MS to the four major clinical research markets in Europe, i.e. Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

The CLAM-2000 (Clinical Laboratory Automated sample preparation Module) automates the pretreatment of blood or other biological samples before LCMS analysis. It is designed for customers handling blood samples in pharmaceutical departments, medical departments or biological analysis laboratories dealing with issues of variability in analytical results or infection risk.

In recent years, there has been considerable progress in the use of mass spectrometers (MS) in the clinical research field due to their highly sensitive detection and high specificity as well as the possibility of multiplexing analysis without the risk of cross reactions inherent to immuno-assays. Mass spectrometry enables direct detection of disease related biological compounds in blood, urine or other biological samples, measurement of trace concentration levels of drugs as well as other applications. However, the bottleneck is still sample preparation which is often tedious, involves risk of errors and increases the risk of contamination of people dealing with sample preparation.

Completely automatic from pretreatment to analysis

By simply placing blood collection tubes in the system, the CLAM-2000 performs all processes through to LC-MS analysis automatically. Unlike dispensing systems based on batch processing 96-well plates, the CLAM-2000 is completely automatic from pretreatment to analysis and processes individual sample successively in parallel. Consequently, it results in uniform pretreatment times between samples without slowing processing speed, while improving data reproducibility and accuracy.

Pretreatment processes available include dispensing samples, dispensing reagents, stirring, suction filtration, incubation and automatic transfer of sample vials to an SIL-30AC autosampler after pretreatment.