With close ties to Duke Univerity, to de-risk preclinical phase in drug development process Qatch Technologies develops microfluidic instrumentation that prescreens injectability and manufacturability of biopharmaceutical drugs. Defined goal: to determine the feasibility of viscosity characterization of high concentration protein formulations (HCF) by QATCHs microcapillary quartz technology. HCFs are non-Newtonian fluids with shear-thinning behavior and they are administered to patients by subcutaneous or muscular injectability of HCFs depends on the viscosity at high-shear-rates (usually over 100,000 1/s). QATCHs technology implements a microfluidic capillary viscometer on a quartz resonator - aunique combination able to interrogate low shear-rate regimes while also measuring the thickness-shear mode resonances of the quartz resonator, which observes viscosity values over 1,000,000 1/s. Result: viscosity of HCFs can be characterized over a wide range of shear-rates with very small fluid volumes. Preliminary studies by the firm have demonstrated that microfluidic quartz can measure viscosity at high-shear-rates experimentally enabling modeling response of the microfluidic quartz resonators to capillary filling of shear-thinning fluids. To accomplish objective, QATCH testing the low and high-shear rate measurement capability of the system and then calculate the required injection forces for well-studied formulations.
