The Covaris system has been demonstrated to offer significant advantages in compound formulation work over mechanical blade and probe based sonicators. These sonicators suffer from reproducibility issues, and can transfer large amounts of heat into the product causing potential degradation.

The Covaris AFA™ technology allows the rapid disaggregation micronizing of compound formulations and slurries, and improving particle distribution data, (please see data below). AFA can operate in batch and continuous flow mode for large volume processing.

Impact of AFA on Inhaled Programs

Covaris-dispersed non-micronized suspensions are very effective in micronizing drug suspensions. Examples include:

• Allowing in vivo testing with much smaller (mg) amounts of drug substance.
• Permiting testing without scaled-up re-synthesi.s
• Avoiding repeated studies.
• Reduction of animal use.
• Impact on the throughput of inhaled lead optimization programs for the future.
• Reduction of poorly-soluble compounds for oral programs.
• Conventional micronizing requires more drug than if using Covaris AFA.

The data below shows the before and after effects of a Covaris treatment.

Starting material

Covaris acoustic treated material

Graph showing reduction in particle distribution.

Graph showing comparison between conventional sonication and Covaris AFA ultra sonication Enlarge image

Improved Particle distribution using AFA Covaris ultra sonication Enlarge image