What accroma does

accroma labtec Ltd. builds laboratory robots for analytical quality control. samplePrep takes a solid starting sample all the way to analysis automatically — including handover to the HPLC and starting the injection. bufferPrep produces aqueous buffer solutions — and on its platform grew eluentPrep, which also handles organic solvents and so delivers the mobile phases that same analysis needs.

Together the two lines cover everything that feeds into a quality result. They are used in pharma from formulation development through to the mandatory tests for batch release — content uniformity and assay — but also beyond it: for pesticide residues on fruit, vegetables and seeds, for instance.

What is special about it

Laboratory automation is usually project business: bespoke installations, mostly for research. accroma deliberately set itself up the other way round — little modularity, strongly standardised instruments, and the flexibility living in the software.

That sounds like less, but it is the reason accroma gets to where others fail. In regulated quality control every installation has to be qualified (IQ/OQ/PVT), and every hardware variant incurs that qualification again. Modularity, a virtue in research, becomes a burden here. Standardised instruments plus the accumulated know-how make qualification manageable — and only then does automation in QC become realistic at all.

• The only supplier with this focus. Lab automation almost always targets R&D; accroma aims at highly regulated quality control.
• Solids, fully automated into the HPLC. One of very few solutions that takes a solid starting sample to analysis-ready without a manual step, hands it over and starts the injection.
• The whole chain, not one step. With eluentPrep the mobile phase comes out of the same automation — everything feeding the result is produced on the record.
• No more unexplainable results. Because every step is automatic and logged without gaps, an OOS result can be traced rather than merely noted.

How MANOVIS supports accroma

The connection is older than accroma itself. accroma labtec is an industrial spin-off of RPD Tools, which delivered laboratory automation as project work. For one such project — a robot for accelerated stability studies at a large pharmaceutical company — MANOVIS developed parts. In that cell samples were stored, stressed with light, heat and humidity, and measured over time: image, weight, NIR, Raman, and as a final stage chemical analysis by HPLC. It was there, together with MANOVIS, that the foundation was laid for automated preparation of solid samples for HPLC.

The step from a project company to a product company then proved harder than expected: there was a prototype, but the path to a market-ready instrument stalled. MANOVIS worked on the restructuring, drove software and hardware development forward, and together with accroma labtec's own people developed the samplePrep that is available today.

It didn't stop at product development. MANOVIS later supported setting up and running a subsidiary in the USA, and advised on acquiring the second product line, bufferPrep — structured as an asset deal rather than a company takeover. What tipped that decision was reading bufferPrep as a platform rather than a product: it makes aqueous buffer solutions, but it is a foundation for more. On that basis, and with MANOVIS alongside, eluentPrep was developed — handling organic solvents too, and only then delivering the mobile phases an HPLC needs. MANOVIS also holds a financial stake in accroma.

For us, accroma is also the school for everything to do with regulated environments. What qualification means, why traceability costs more than speed, and what a piece of evidence has to look like to hold up in an audit — we learned that here. That experience now sits inside easo, our own quality-management software.