Chromatography is a biopharma workhorse and its use is expanding worldwide at a staggering pace. To leverage the growing datasets from this technology, organizations will need forward-looking strategies for data management. Merely storing, securing, and archiving chromatography data is not enough. Biopharmas need a next-generation solution.
The Tetra Scientific Data and AI Cloud addresses this need by transforming chromatography data into future-proof, AI-native Tetra Data. Our latest updates to Tetra Data help you unlock even more value from your chromatography data. They provide enhanced support for analytical and AI-enabled use cases, such as method transfer/validation and human-in-the-loop automated peak integration.
Pressing challenges for chromatography scientists
Conversations with biopharma customers who use chromatography systems revealed common pain points and desired outcomes. Here are the key challenges that inspired our most recent updates:
- High vendor diversity. The chromatography landscape is marked by a broad range of vendors, equipment, software, ontologies, and raw data formats. This diversity results in a fragmented data environment with minimal standardization and highly heterogeneous data.
- Comparability issues. The lack of standardization across data formats, analytical algorithms, and system capabilities leads to chromatograms, methods, and results that are only useful for their initial purpose. Scientists struggle to compare data across diverse hardware and software within an organization, limiting their ability to draw broader or deeper insights.
- Limited context. Hundreds of parameters contribute to the generation, analysis, and reporting of chromatography data. However, only a small percentage of this information is included in standard outputs. Without such context, it is difficult to accurately interpret the data or reproduce the results.
So what’s new in Tetra Data?
With the release of Tetra Chromeleon Agent v2.1.1 and IDS v6.0.1, chromatography Tetra Data is harmonized and enhanced in three ways:
- Common components for chromatography methods introduce a foundation for data and method comparability.
- A comprehensive list of reportable parameters provides valuable context for chromatography data.
- Broader, inclusive support of third-party components offers expanded compatibility with a wide and growing list of hardware.
Let’s take a closer look.
1. Comparability of data and methods
Chromatography data provides valuable insights on the separation, identification, and purification of sample components. However, with so many vendors, methods, and peak-resolving algorithms, comparing data can be arduous. Tetra Chromeleon IDS v6.0.1 unveils an exciting new component in Tetra Data that aligns common reportable fields across different vendors’ CDS outputs. Once replatformed on the Tetra Data Platform (TDP), chromatography data is engineered with a standardized ontology to become vendor-agnostic Tetra Data. Harmonized data allows a parallel query structure between different IDSs, making an SQL query directly transferable from one CDS to another. As a result, methods and results on one instrument using Chromeleon can be compared to those of another using Empower, Shimadzu, UNICORN, or any other CDS following the same method. Simplified comparisons of chromatograms, methods and results across instruments and software vendors help scientists transfer and validate methods throughout the organization, enhancing the value and reach of each experiment.
Chromeleon IDS v6.0.0 marks the first release of the chromatography method IDS component, with more vendors to come in future updates.
2. Broader access to context-providing information
The complexity of chromatographic data requires a flexible toolbox for analyzing injection report variables. While retrieving a default parameter value like peak resolution from the CDS is straightforward, there are many ways to calculate this value. The context or formula used for this calculation may not accompany the data, despite its utility to the user. Contextual parameters, in contrast, provide a better understanding of the method and peak integration conditions. The Tetra Chromeleon IDS now supports more than 600 injection report variables, including peak widths at given heights, peak amount calibration data, peak resolution, and theoretical plates. This additional context will improve downstream decision-making, reproducibility, and compliance.
3. Expanded compatibility
The chromatography equipment industry encompasses a wide range of vendors, systems, and components. Chromeleon is capable of collecting and analyzing data from a variety of them. Historically, the Tetra Chromeleon IDS required updates to parse and support new hardware integrated with the CDS. With Chromeleon IDS v6.0.1, however, a dynamic approach is used to retrieve data from all connected hardware, even if it was previously unencountered. This ensures that users can immediately utilize all data from the CDS as the hardware setup evolves.
When outputs become outcomes
Replatforming and engineering data into a large-scale, liquid, and compliant resource is an impressive output, but the outcomes it can deliver are what truly matter. Let’s consider an example to illustrate this point.
One prominent biotech monitors product stability using a reversed-phase ion-pair liquid chromatography assay to measure the purity of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) products. This is a time consuming process, taking 24 hours to run 96 samples across 4 Thermo Scientific high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems and another 45 minutes to analyze the results in the Chromeleon CDS. This workflow faces two major challenges:
- Manual processing. mRNA molecules are large, and degradation products often exhibit subtle differences that are challenging to differentiate—that is, their peaks in the chromatogram do not fully resolve but rather overlap. Experimental variation complicates the results further, making it difficult to automate the analysis. As a result, processing parameters need to be manually optimized for each run within Chromeleon.
- Inaccessible data. Process monitoring is difficult without ready access to data. Longitudinal charting depends on liquid data to track instrument variability and performance and to predict column degradation. Failing to do so can be costly—resulting in repairs, delays from repeat experiments, and lost materials. Manual efforts to aggregate and process this data for analysis are burdensome and prone to errors.
The Tetra Scientific Data and AI Cloud provides the capabilities to address these issues. The Tetra Chromeleon Agent and IDS pipelines automate the assembly and engineering of chromatography data, making the data fully accessible to scientists. For instance, they can now access data through round-trip data automation with their ELN. The resulting open, liquid, and purpose-engineered Tetra Data create value-adding outcomes for this customer. They can achieve operational and quality control enhancements through process monitoring and predictive maintenance, and support analytical use cases such as ML model building for human-in-the-loop semi-automated analysis. With TetraScience, the biotech company is improving how it captures and leverages its scientific data, eliminating tedious manual processes, and enhancing its AI readiness.
Conclusion
The growing superset of chromatography data in biopharma is highly diverse and unstandardized. Results often lack the full context of how they were captured and analyzed. Comparing across organizations, labs, or even different systems is difficult. The Tetra Scientific Data and AI Cloud is well positioned as the next-generation solution with the largest and fastest-growing library of integrations. The latest Tetra Chromeleon IDS lays a foundation for standardized, interoperable chromatography data (Tetra Data) that can be queried using the same terms and compared across all supported CDSs—and for emerging AI use cases that depend on it.
Chromeleon CDS Agent v2.1.1 also includes performance and robustness enhancements that minimize delays in the Agent to ensure reliability. More information can be found in the release notes.
Interested in learning more about leveling up your chromatography data? Contact one of our experts today.