Extraction Plate Boosts Productivity for Clozapine Testing at King’s College Hospital

King’s College Hospital, London, has established a fully automated therapeutic drug monitoring protocol for clozapine using Tecan’s AC Extraction Plate™ and Freedom EVO® liquid handling platform. Lewis Couchman, Senior Clinical Scientist (Clinical Biochemistry Laboratory and Toxicology Department), explained: “We perform about 30,000 tests a year for clozapine, preparing the samples manually by liquid-liquid extraction. We wanted to automate the analytical process, making it more rapid and robust, and less prone to human error – as well as reducing costs and providing the capacity to grow the service – and the AC Extraction Plate and Freedom EVO have the potential to make a real difference to our workflow.”

“Currently, samples arriving at the laboratory by 1 pm are manually extracted during the afternoon, run overnight, and the results reported the following day. The Freedom EVO can prepare a whole AC Extraction Plate in around 30 minutes, followed directly by LC-MS analysis, with a runtime of just under four minutes a sample. We have compared around 500 samples prepared manually and using the automated method, and are really impressed with the results; there is no discrepancy between the two methods. We are in the final stages of the evaluation phase, but everybody is excited at the prospect of seeing it implemented.”