A note from an HPLC column supplier on why they can't import a steel column weighing about 10 or 20 grams.

[NNadir]

We're working with a client to develop a cancer treatment, and it requires a very special kind of HPLC column that is made only in Europe.

We're in the middle of validating the method, and we've been ordering these columns on a tight time line.

Here's the note we got from the supplier:

The columns are currently in customs. I wish we could rush that, but we cannot. It used to be that the agents would clear our items quickly because they were very familiar with our company and types of products. Unfortunately the current administration hanged that:

“With the new tariff regulations for any shipment with steel and aluminum content you can expect a customs clearance delay. It’s a manual process where the customs broker must work up a spreadsheet that can consist of hundreds of part numbers and ask for specific details for each one. Then once compiled the supplier needs to go through each one to get the broker the correct information. Then it can take the broker another day or two to manually input that info into their systems so they can transmit an entry to customs.”

This is very frustrating for us, too, but there is no current solution to the delay this creates.

I have attempted to get information from you on your use of these columns and have gotten no response...

If you think that the nut case worm brain Kennedy and the attacks on the NIH in particular, the FDA, are the only part of the approach to killing people by empowering the ignorant, think again.

We can't get basic essential scientific supplies.

Unbelievable.

20 grams of steel.

Unbelievable.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. A column that weighs 10 or 20 grams?

Under an ounce? What in the world would such a light-weight column be used for? Perhaps telling us what "HPLC" stands for would help.

[NNadir]

2. I apologize for the "shop talk." My mind was blown by this...

"HPLC" stands for "High Performance Liquid Chromatography" a technique in analytical chemistry that is widely used to separate components of a complex mixture in order to determine what components are present and how much of each component detected is there.

In our case, we are using this technique to understand the presence and metabolites of a cancer treatment drug. The detection limits are on the order of billionths of a gram in a milliliter of blood.

This technology is very important in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, environmental monitoring, agriculture, forensics and many other fields.

A column is a small tube, usually metal, filled with materials that are designed to interact with materials through adsorption of the analyzes of interest in such a way as to slow their flow through the tube based on their structures and other properties. They range in size from a tiny "nanoflow" column that fits in the palm of a hand, to columns a few hundred cm in analytical labs. I have seen columns several stories high in industrial plants designed for the purification of industrial products like certain classes of drugs. (This is generally an expensive proposition, best avoided but sometimes necessary.)

There are literally tens of thousands, perhaps more, of such materials called "stationary phases" placed in columns to do these separations, designed for different classes of materials. It is a huge area of science on which whole careers are spent, designing stationary phases and commercializing them so as to make them available to analytical scientists.

The HPLC industry is on a scale of billions of dollars per year.

The class of compounds on which we are working is very unusual, and identifying a column to achieve the required separations in this matrix, blood plasma, was a huge challenge.

Wikipedia's page on HPLC is very good if you are interested in more information.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Thank you for that explanation.