Edman Sequencer Community,
I have a problem that I think is of general interest to the community
and would appreciate some advice. We use our Edman sequencer for the usual
applications and also to supply data for FDA/EU submissions. We own an
HP/Agilent machine and are suffering through Agilent's attempt to transfer
reagent manufacturing to an outside vendor (HP/Agilent has stopped selling the
machine and will support existing ones for only a few more years). The bottom
line is that we cannot get reagents from the vendor at a time when we need to
provide data for an FDA submission (to those unfamiliar with this type of
thing...picture major major crisis, teeth gnashing and shredding of garments).
We have been lucky and found a hidden cache of oldie but goodie reagents so we
and the company will survive this crisis but I tend to look to the future and
it scares me. I will have to persuade management to come up with the bucks to
buy an ABI machine (sorry I can't keep up with the name-of- the-day for this
company). We will then be dependent on one and only one vendor. What if ABI
has a major reagent screw up? What if ABI decides that they have better things
to do than put up with the hassles inherent in this product (have you checked
out their web site?...it takes a great deal of digging to find Edman
machines....obviously a very very small part of their business). Other uses of
Edman aside, I am wondering about the wisdom of including Edman data in future
FDA/EU submissions. Should we be proactive and plan for the worse case
scenario before it happens (similar to Bay area residents planning for the BIG
ONE)? If ABI were to announce next week that they are going out of the
sequencer business what would we do?
Jim Bloom
Bayer Corp
Berkeley
510-705-7760
jim.bloom.b@bayer.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 10 2000 - 09:45:23 EST