(277d) Collaborative Development of an Auto-Sampling Probe for HPLC

Pre-competitive collaborations allow pharmaceutical companies to work with each other and with instrument vendors to develop new and valuable enabling technologies.  Here, we describe the evolution of a collaboration between five pharmaceutical companies and an instrument vendor to develop an auto-sampling probe for HPLC.  This started as an in-house technology development project at Pfizer with the goal of automatically sampling reactions for profiling by HPLC where the liquid and solid components of heterogeneous reactions are sampled representatively.  The project evolved from working with an internal machine shop to collaborating externally with Mettler which provided key engineering expertise.  The collaboration further evolved to include valuable input and support from the pharma partners.  As the probe was developed from proof of concept to an alpha prototype to a beta prototype and ultimately the commercialization phase at Mettler, each of the pharma partners contributed to testing the system in real life project applications and provided design input and feedback.