Chromatography Forum

Hello everyone,

I am a French student in a pan-european school (French-British-German). My reason for registering on this forum is that I have to make a consultancy project (nothing to sell !) about HPLC vs electrophoresis (acetate/agarose/capillary) in Europe and in the US, as regards the molecule HbA1c for diabete detection particularly.

I have already collected some data but one important is missing and I cannot find it on my own: how much does an HPLC test cost to a "normal" lab (my project does not focus on research but on analyses made on patients) ? What does this cost include ? (reagent or not, amortization of the equipment, labour...) (particularly for testing HbA1c again)
Why would a lab use rather HPLC than capillary (or reverse !) ?

Last but not least: does HPLC material require experienced technicians ? (I think so, but we never know... I suppose we can assume that interpreting the results requires some expertise).

I have already searched on the Internet and even called several labs/hospitals, but either they don't know or they don't want to tell...

Thank you in advance !

You've actually asked a somewhat complicated question. I once priced out the "disposables" cost for doing a drug assay by HPLC with a UV detector, and it came to around $10. However, that doesn't really measure the true cost. I am not that familiar with the analyte you mentioned, but if it is a protein, you may need an antibody in the assay somewhere, regardless whether you use HPLC or electrophoresis. It's hard to get the necessary selectivity otherwise. That will increase the "disposables" cost dramatically.

Capital costs are significant. You can get a "bare bones" HPLC for about $20K, but $40-50K is more typical by the time you throw in automation features and data analysis software. Conventional electrophoresis equipment is much cheaper, but a modern capillary electrophoresis setup isn't.

Add $150-400K if you want/need to use a mass spectrometer as the detector.

Then there's all the other lab equipment like balances, centrifuges, refrigerators, and ultra low temperature freezers.

Then there's personnel costs. For either HPLC or electrophoresis, the analyst will have a least a 4 year degree, and may have considerably more education, and generally makes a pretty decent living. Then there's all the people that go with the actual analyst, like supervisors, clerical/administrative staff, and (especially in a regulated environment) safety and quality assurance staff. Most of these folks also make decent salaries.

Add another layer of costs if the lab participates in any certification programs (as most clinical laboratories do).

Finally, you have to have a building to do all this work in. Laboratories are expensive to build and maintain.

I would guess that overall, 99% of the cost of a single analysis is just in being set up to do that kind of analysis, and only 1% is in the consumables for that particular assay.

I will support Mary's post. The "cost" depends a lot on how you do the accounting.

For clinical assays of proteins, you can compare three techniques:
- slab-gel electrophoresis
- HPLC
- immunoassay

in that order:

electrophoresis is the most flexible, requires very little in the way of capital equipment, is not particularly reproducible, is slow, and is very labor-intensive.

HPLC requires much more capital expense (as Mary pointed out), is less flexible (specific conditions must be developed for each assay) but it is faster, easier to quantitate, and more amenable to automation.

Immunoassay is the fastest, cheapest in terms of consumables, and the least labor intensive. It is far more capital-intensive and requires a great deal of up-front effort to develop a particular assay.

In general, electrophoresis is used in "research" applications where the number of samples is limited and flexibility is important. At higher sample loads, HPLC makes more sense because of the easier quantitation and automation. It is used for "routine but uncommon" assays like HbA1c. Immunoassay is used for standard analyses where the up-front costs can be amortized over a huge (hundreds of thousands of samples) number of tests.

Thank you for your answers ! It will be helpful for my project