by Gina Shaw

Water was a problem for Leonard Tini. In his drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics laboratory at AstraZeneca (Wilmington, DE), Tini runs high-throughput studies - mostly cell-based assays. His group used half a dozen Tecan Inc. (Durham, NC) robots, and their appetite for liquid was ravenous. But the water system was cumbersome, to say the least.

The robot comes with a jug that you have to fill up with water, degas with helium, and then use to run the instrument," says Tini, a senior associate scientist. "Some of our assays are so long that we had to put in a bigger jug - 18 liters, two or three feet tall." Since the jugs were so hard to maneuver, Tini decided to put them all on a deck and run a hose to them to fill them up - but as often as not, someone would forget the hose was on and flooding would ensue.

The photo shows the AFS water system mounted on the wall behind laboratory robots.

Back problems from wrestling heavy jugs were just one of the issues. During a three- to four-hour assay, the liquid degassed for the process eventually begins to become gaseous again, interfering with the robotic syringes and jeopardizing the assay. "One way to remedy that is to run a helium sparge, which bubbles helium through the water to keep the tank out," Tini says. "But then, you have a helium tank in the lab, which is another safety issue - the tanks can fall and hurt someone. Safety rules dictate that you have to put helium tanks in an outside closet and run pipe-work into the lab, which is another cost. It's a domino effect with the money."

What Tini wanted was simple: to put all his robots in one room and have a completely degassed liquid on demand. He'd heard that Millipore Corp.'s (Billerica, MA) AFS water systems, designed to feed clinical analyzers, might fit the bill. Could they modify and upgrade the system to meet his lab's needs?

Tini contacted the company, and after several iterations, he and the Millipore team came up with a system that addressed his needs and dramatically reduced the lab's water costs.

A 60-liter reservoir tank with a continuous pump feeds CPVC pipe in a loop throughout the lab, traversing up and down to feed each of six robots. "There are valves on the bottom of each loop, and each loop feeds a robot," Tini explains. "It's a very low-pressure system, and all of it is closed. There's a chance that if you leave a robot out, sunlight will degas the liquid."

The system, which cost under $10,000, has already paid for itself many times over in saved water costs during just the year and a half it's been operational. "It doesn't use house-distilled water; that's another system that somebody has to maintain. It runs off of tap water," Tini says. The system automatically refills itself from the tap through a filtration system. From the filtration system, water goes to a small holding tank, and from there through a degasser and into a large tank. "The large tank circulates through the loop. It has a float in it, and as the float goes down, it refills itself. A one-way valve prevents air from getting in.

"As a byproduct, we have another hose coming out of the system that we use for HPLC grade water, which we use on all our mass spectrometers. When the distilled water breaks down, everybody else in the building comes to me to get water," Tini says. The HPLC-grade water used to cost him $14 a gallon; now, he pays just $.30 for that amount. He's found that the system works fine with various robots, including Tecan Genesis, Tecan Ivo (Tecan US, Durham, NC) and Caliper Sciclone (Caliper Life Sciences, Hopkinton, MA) systems, all of which use the same kind of syringe.

There have been additional unexpected benefits as well. "We calibrated all six of the robots at once, because we wanted to put a load on it and make sure it would work. In fact, the precision was better than before with a stand-alone system," Tini says. "And because the robot's always ready to go, it cuts maybe 20 minutes off your start-up time."

Leonard Tini doesn’t have the background you might expect in a drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics lab for a major drug company. He doesn’t have an M.D. after his name, or a Ph.D., or any D. After four years at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, studying to be a pharmacist, his money ran out and he went to work at a hospital in Landsdowne, Pennsylvania, that’s now called Mercy Catholic Medical Center. Eventually, he proved so adept that the hospital hired him as a night pharmacist, degree or no degree. He spent four years there profiling medications and checking physician orders in under the aegis of a licensed pharmacist. He left the hospital for a five-year stint at Wyeth in their quality assurance laboratories, before moving on to a career at AstraZeneca that’s spanned some 17 years. “When robotics came into the department, I took the lead in that as well as mass spectrometry,” he says. “Right now I work with an automation and instrumentation group, developing new robotic methods and maintaining the robots and mass spectrometers.”