Automation can benefit pharmaceutical development by enabling the accelerated assessment of the physico-chemical characteristics of investigational new drugs utilizing high-throughput screens. Two major advantages to automation are preventing scientific staff from performing repetitive labor intensive tasks and reducing the amount of compound required for testing.

Quantification of low-abundance proteins remains a challenge for proteomics research. Standard LC-MS/MS often lacks the sensitivity to detect the crucial players in pathways, cellular processes, or biopharma manufacturing. Capillary LC-MS/MS emerges as a compelling solution, offering exceptional sensitivity and minimal sample volume requirements.

The compact, portable Axcend Focus LC (Axcend, Provo, UT, USA) comes equipped with either an on-capillary or miniature flow-cell UV-absorbance detector and is suitable for in-field applications as an autonomous instrument.1,2 It can also be used in a laboratory setting as a stationary compact liquid chromatograph (LC). In the latter case, the sensitivity and identification capabilities of the instrument can be enhanced by interfacing it with a suitable mass spectrometer (MS). In this work, we interfaced an Axcend Focus LC to an Agilent Ultivo, which is among the smallest footprint commercially available triple quadrupole mass spectrometers.