Introduction
To eliminate drugs with unsuitable properties as early as possible in the drug development process, pharmacokinetic (PK) screening is getting more and more attention in early drug discovery. Due to the large number of compounds and samples that have to be analyzed at this stage, it becomes a necessity to automate the optimization of the mass spectrometer and data acquisition for each compound. AutoQuan is a solution for the automated optimization, method development and quantification on a high-resolution triple quadrupole mass spectrometer

Method
Each row of wells, on a well or μtiter, plate can contain a different compound or compounds to analyze. This way, 72 different compounds can automatically be optimized and analyzed using the autosampler with three 384 well plates. During the optimization step of the procedure the system makes use of the valve that is incorporated in the system to tune the system through loop injections and thus bypassing the analytical column. In this easy way, a lot of time is saved. The instrument optimization includes tuning of optical lenses, ion polarity under different LC conditions, collision energy of known SRM transitions, or finding the most intense product ions and their optimized collision energy etc. After the optimization step a complete acquisition sequence and a method file is past on to LCquan to acquire the blanks, standards, QC’s and unknowns. AutoQuan in combination with LCQUAN 2.0 offers a complete solution for the automated optimization, method development and quantification on a high-resolution triple quadrupole mass spectrometer.