Kirsten Craven

Inside the box: Acoustic ejection mass spectrometry for drug discovery

Feb 12, 2025 | Blogs, Discovery, Echo® MS+ system, Pharma, QA/QC | 0 comments

Read time: 2 minutes

On average, it takes 10-15 years and 1-2 billion dollars to approve a new pharmaceutical for clinical use. Since approximately 90% of new drug candidates fail in clinical development, the ability to make early, informed and accurate decisions on the safety and efficacy of new hits and leads is key to increasing the chances of success.

To achieve this drug discovery assays require speed and accuracy, but often scientists must compromise on one of these requirements to cope with the thousands of samples that need to be analyzed.

Running a 384 microwell plate in 10 mins

The Echo® MS+ system allows pharmaceutical companies to make data-driven decisions early in the drug discovery process, saving time and money, and potentially getting their drug to market faster than with more traditional approaches. Common analytical techniques such as LC-MS or fluorescence are limited by either sample throughput or accuracy of results.

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Acoustic ejection mass spectrometry (AEMS) couples rapid sampling with mass spectrometry detection to overcome these limitations.

The Echo® MS+ system uses acoustic ejection mass spectrometry (AEMS) technology. Samples are placed into a compatible well plate which is held in the Echo® MS+ system’s autosampler. Here sound energy is applied to the bottom of each well individually. The sound energy causes reproducible droplets to be ejected from the well for capture in a carrier solvent of the OPI for dilution and transfer to the mass spectrometer’s source. From this point, the diluted sample is ionized using conventional electrospray ionization, ready for detection.

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Kirsten Craven

Kirsten Craven is the Senior Global Marketing Manager for Pharma global strategic marketing at SCIEX. In this role, she manages strategic marketing for the pharmaceutical industry. Kirsten spent the first part of her career working in laboratories across multiple industries before moving into product management, and most recently pharma marketing.

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