Echo® MS System
The drug discovery lifecycle follows a relatively well-established pattern aimed at screening thousands to millions of compounds from a library of drug candidates to identify potential new targets for therapeutic use. These screens take the most promising molecules into the development process for mechanistic understanding and compound optimization.
Until now these primary screens have relied on technologies that are relatively simple to learn and use but that can be time consuming to continually develop new assays for and regularly expensive to operate as they require custom substrates for the assays to work.
The new Echo® MS system by SCIEX is an acoustic ejection mass spectrometry platform, allowing similar sample speeds as fluorescence-based detectors, but that directly measures the product without alteration or labelling. It provides the trusted analytical performance that drug development laboratories are used to with LC-MS/MS, but on the time scale that screening laboratories require.
The acoustic ejection system delivers very small, reproducible droplets that are ejected from high-density well plates, and is compatible with a variety of solutions and matrices typically used. These ejected droplets are captured by the Open Port Interface (OPI) device which uses a laminar flow of carrier solution that dilutes and transports the sample to the electrospray source, where it is ionized by conventional electrospray. This process forms a contactless sample introduction method with minimal carry-over and minimal matrix effects.
Key features of the SCIEX Echo® MS system
• Rapid sample analysis: one sample per second for a single analyte, and up to 3 samples per second in multiplex mode
• Highly reproducible sample ejection
• Extremely low potential for carryover
• Broad compound coverage using electrospray ionization featuring the OptiFlow® Turbo V Ion Source for robust and efficient ionization
• Industry proven high sensitivity and quantitative robustness using the SCIEX Triple Quad™ 6500+ LC-MS/MS system
• Ease of operation using SCIEX OS software
• Purpose built for incorporation into HTS workflows
• Sample plate tray can be accessed by most robotic arms
• Open software API for incorporation of platform into existing automated HTS environments
