The largest carbon cost in a solubility and aggregation workflow is not the instrument or the solvent. It is the compound itself.
In a solubility and aggregation workflow, the largest carbon contributor is the compound itself. When we modeled the footprint of a typical HPLC-based campaign, compound consumption accounted for roughly half of the total CO₂e, ahead of both solvent and instrument electricity. It is also the dominant contributor to the assay cost.
To reduce costs and carbon emission, the way to go is to reduce compound consumption. Every milligram of a medicinal-chemistry compound carries the footprint of its synthesis: multi-step routes, purification, solvents, energy, and yield losses at each stage. When a method consumes tens of microlitres of stock per well, that footprint is spent on every datapoint.
A worked example: a 1,000-plate campaign
To make the comparison concrete, we ran the numbers for a campaign 1,000 × 96-well plates (96,000 datapoints) per year. 10 mM compound stock in DMSO, molecular weight 500 g/mol, synthesis cost €250 per mg and synthesis footprint 250 kg CO₂e per gram. Both synthesis factors are adjustable inputs and vary widely by molecule, so treat them as illustrative values.
The compound is the cost
HPLC-MS uses about 50 µL of stock per well. Across the campaign that is 24 g of compound, or €6.0M, which is 82% of the €7.36M annual bill.
| Annual cost | HPLC-MS | ORYL F1 |
|---|---|---|
| Compound | ~€6.0M | ~€240K |
| Consumables | ~€1.1M | ~€30K |
| Capital + Maintenance | ~€131K | ~€85K |
| Total | ~€7.36M | ~€365K |
ORYL F1 uses about 2 µL of stock per well, so the same 96,000 datapoints consume 0.96 g of compound.
The compound generates the most CO₂e
The HPLC-MS campaign emits about 11.4 t CO₂e per year. More than half comes from the compound.
| CO₂e per year | HPLC-MS | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Compound (24 g synthesized) | 6.0 t | 52% |
| Electricity (~9,600 kWh) | 2.9 t | 25% |
| Solvent (~1,500 L mobile phase) | 2.5 t | 23% |
| Total | ~11.4 t |
For scale, 11.4 t is roughly 10 months of the total carbon footprint of one person in Switzerland.
The same campaign on ORYL F1 emits about 0.38 t CO₂e, roughly 30× less. There is no chromatographic mobile phase, compound use is 25× lower, and a 384-well plate is read in ~15 minutes.
Savings with ORYL F1
Compared with HPLC-MS, per year:
€6.99M saved (95% reduction) 267 days saved (271 days vs 3.5 days)
Why the difference is mostly compound
ORYL F1 measurement is optical and made in situ: no separation step, no mobile phase, and no need to load enough material for a chromatographic signal. Less compound per well removes the largest cost and the largest carbon term. No chromatography removes the solvent term. 384 wells in ~15 minutes reduces instrument time, and with it electricity and labour.
ORYL F1 is an alternative to HPLC-based solubility workflows, not a replacement for every use case. Where chromatographic quantitation is required, HPLC remains the right tool.
What this means in practice
For discovery teams, low-compound profiling means solubility and aggregation data can be generated for an entire hit list at a stage where material is scarce and decisions carry the most leverage. For formulation teams, it means mapping a formulation window or running supersaturation kinetics across many conditions without consuming grams of API. In both cases, de-risking solubility and aggregation early replaces late surprises with early certainty, and does so with a fraction of the material, solvent, and energy.
We present ORYL F1 as an alternative to HPLC-based solubility workflows, not a replacement for every use case. Where a chromatographic assay is required, it remains the right tool. Where the question is “which molecules or conditions have a solubility or aggregation problem, and where are the boundaries,” a plate-based optical measurement answers it with far less input.
Run your own campaign
Change plate count, format, stock concentration, molecular weight, compound cost and synthesis footprint, and compare HPLC-MS, HPLC-UV, DLS and ORYL F1 on cost, time and CO₂e.