DMPK studies how a drug is handled within the body. This is important for the selection of drug candidates during early to late discovery and the characterisation of the drug during pre-clinical and clinical development.
The new datasheet: "Watson LIMS - The acknowledged standard in LIMS for bioanalytical laboratories" and is aimed at scientists in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and Contract Research Organisations (CROs).
As well as providing an overview of the data processing capabilities of Thermo's Watson LIMS, the new datasheet discusses the challenges facing pharmaceutical companies and CROs to decrease costs while optimising efficiency.
As a commercial-off-the-shelf solution, Watson claims to reduce risk and total cost of ownership compared to generic LIMS, which require customisation to meet the needs of bioanalytical laboratories.
Watson LIMS has been designed to require minimal configuration, resulting in fast implementation, validation, upgrades and immediate efficiency gains.
It is equipped with key functionality specific to the DMPK laboratory, including flexible protocol-based study design, assay/method standardisation and management, integrated sample management and a configurable re-assay decision tree.
Advances in drug R&D such as parallel synthesis, combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening have resulted in increased demand for powerful, fast and selective analysis tools for drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic studies.
Scientists need to obtain information on absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion to increase the probability of a drug candidate with minimal toxicity and maximum efficacy for the indication of interest.
DMPK and bioanalytical assays are typically prepared using liquid-liquid extraction, protein precipitation or solid phase extraction (SPE), and the samples are separated by HPLC before quantitative analysis using MS.
While high-throughput methods have emerged for extraction techniques, chromatography remains a significant bottleneck for DMPK studies.
More details on the Watson LIMS is available from Thermo Electron's website.