Waters Corporation and Andrew Alliance have signed an agreement that will bring drug development scientists an easy-to-use, semi-automated sample preparation approach for released N-glycan profiling and analysis by LC and LC-MS. Under the co-marketing agreement, Waters will combine its existing Glycoworks RapiFluor-MS N-Glycan Kit with an Andrew pipetting robot that will allow laboratories to meet the demands on them for glycan profiling while improving the accuracy and precision of LC and LC-MS results. "With the increasing number of protein therapeutics in development, the demand for glycan analyses is growing exponentially," said Dr. Jeff Mazzeo, Vice President, Consumables Group, Waters Corporation.

"The combination of the Andrew robot with the Waters RapiFluor-MS N-Glycan Kit is an ideal solution for automating large numbers of routine, high-quality released N-glycan analyses." Piero Zucchelli, CEO and Founder of Andrew Alliance stated, "The Waters Glycoworks RapiFluor-MS N-Glycan Kit offers strategic and critical value that should not be compromised by the uncertainty induced by manual sample pipetting. The use of the Andrew robot for unattended execution of the kit’s sample preparation workflow addresses this point and enables scientists to make decisions based on solid and reproducible data." Most biotherapeutic proteins available on the market today are glycoproteins.

The heterogeneous sugar molecules, or glycans, on these proteins affect the potency, 34 Maple Street Milford, MA 01757-3696 U.S.A. [T] 508.478.2000 [T] 1.800.252.4752 [F] 508.872.1990 [W] www.waters.com stability, and therapeutic safety profiles of these drugs. As a result, biopharmaceutical companies must provide detailed structural information on these glycans when submitting new applications to regulatory authorities and must monitor them throughout the manufacturing process. Since the launch of the GlycoWorks RapiFluor-MS N-Glycan Kit in February of 2015, laboratories worldwide have seen the benefits of simplified sample preparation and achieved unprecedented levels of sensitivity and speed.

The combination of Waters and Andrew Alliance technologies takes released Nglycan sample preparation to the next level by making it simpler and more efficient to scale up samples tested with the same enhanced optical and MS sensitivity users have experienced with the RapiFluor-MS labelling reagent. Semi-automation of released N-glycans is now affordable and easily accessible.