SCIEX Presents Echo® MS System at ASMS Reboot

SCIEX has presented the Echo® MS System at ASMS Reboot 2020. Now commercially available, this system harnesses proprietary Acoustic Ejection Mass Spectrometry technology with the Open Port Interface to set a new milestone for high-throughput quantification and workflows.

The Echo® MS System is an ultra-high sample throughput system that is designed to deliver speed, scale and reproducibility with unyielding data quality. The system leverages quantitative MS technology from SCIEX to provide a highly sensitive solution featuring:

• Speed: Analyze up to 3 samples per second to deliver quantitative results up to 50 times faster than conventional LC-MS.
• Scale: Project timelines are transformed from weeks into days, while retaining precise, information-rich answers that enable critical decisions to be made faster.
• Reproducibility: Experience unparalleled standards of quantification with consistent and precise reproducibility even in challenging matrices.

“If you can finish a study within a few days rather than weeks, it makes a big difference. You learn in each iteration cycle of experiments…the innovation cycle can be much faster. We want to get the data faster or cheaper or actually, both,” says Thomas Hankemeier, Professor of Analytical Biosciences, University of Leiden, Netherlands, who believes the speed of the Echo® MS System can be transformative to research processes.

“By measuring more samples, you can increase the speed of screens, tox tests and drug research to impact faster decision making,” adds Hankemeier. The scale at which quantitative results can be achieved in a short amount of time also has the potential to open up new fields to quantitative MS. “You can now go to applications where you have tens of thousands of samples to screen, and use MS as read-out. This creates new research fields within throughput experimentation.”

The Echo® MS System also could be useful in drug discovery and the development of precision therapies. In the search for safe and efficacious drugs, speed of decision making is critical to the discovery process and to identify potential targets to take forward. With the potential to impact the entire workflow from start to finish, including sample prep, data acquisition and data processing, this system aims to reduce the timescale to produce data used in key decision making.

Dan Weston, Associate Director of DMPK at Sygnature Discovery explains, “[The Echo MS System produces] fit for purpose data quicker, promising a lot in terms of being able to drive drug projects forward through a DMPK end point…If it forces you to think differently, then you can recreate something that will enable you to make more aggressive timelines and be able to meet them…It gives us a chance to think again about how we might re-engineer what we do in terms of a workflow start to end. It’s a step-change and a potential game changer that could allow us to do things dramatically differently.”

“The current global pandemic has underscored the urgent need for new scientific innovations that will enable faster drug discovery, vaccine development, disease understanding and how it affects individuals,” says Inese Lowenstein, President of SCIEX. “We are excited about the feedback from our collaborators that the Echo MS System will deliver a step-change to their entire workflow. We look forward to partnering with our customers as we jointly capture the full potential behind this exciting new technology.”