† Axsym Makes Our Life Easier? †

We pharmacist often do therapeutic drug monitoring aka TDM and most of our on-calls during the week days are associated with medication dose confirmation such as antibiotics, anti epileptic drugs and most common of all, paracetamol poisoning. With the technique of TDM and pharmacokinetic calculations, we are able to determine whether or not a patient is receiving adequate amount of medication or the patient has a potential of toxicity.


Our previous TDM machine has been giving us a lot of headaches and finally we're able to get rid of it and here we have Abbott's Axsym. After using the previous antique TDM machine for such a long time, it can be hard for technology caveman pharmacists like us to operate such sophisticated machine.

Generally, this huge machine is consisted of 3 segments:

1. Sampling Centre

This is the first area where the sample will land.


The black compartments is where the sampling reagent will be placed. Apparently there are more than 10 compartments which means more than 10 different drugs can be tested at the same time.


Sampling tube is where the blood serum will be placed prior to be analyzed by the machine.


Reactor vessel is where the machine's probe (something like the hand of this machine) will place the serum along with the reagent before it is sent into the processing centre.


The left steel stick as you can see on the left part of the picture is the so-called probe thing.


In case your eyes aren't observant enough, here you are, the probe. So the probe's function is to served as the hand of this machine, picking up or inserting liquids into the vessels.

2. Processing Centre

This is the second area where the sample goes: the processing centre.


It looks complicated but you can handle it like a baby.


These tubes are important because they can affect your results of the sampling if there are bubbles in it. So make sure there's no bubble(s) in it.


Colleague Yap with his cute face looking at my camera.


Colleague Fiza trying to observe the inner part of the machine.


This is the carousel, where the reactor vessels will be placed and analyzed by the machine.


My colleagues were learning to detach and replace some parts of this machine.

3. Analyzing Centre

Results will be shown here in analyzing centre.


The keyboard looks nice but its slightly differs from the normal keyboard we're using.

4. Miscellaneous

Well well, there's nothing much I can talk about here and its mainly a huge rubbish bin and a few solution that we used for this machine.

Keat's Thought:
Pros: This machine is rather user friendly and many samples can be analyzed at once. This is for sure a better machine than the previous idiotic out-dated machine. Many manual procedures have been automated and it saves a pharmacist's time.

Cons: Complicated function. Many functions are remain unknown to us because this machine was not made solely for TDM. As I was told by the product specialist that this machine can be used for tracing opioid misuse, cancer marker, so on and so forth. Also, the price of this machine. I won't want to reveal the price here but I think readers will get a rough figure by themselves.

Conclusion: Axsym makes our life easier? No idea at all and the conclusion will be presented after a few months of trial on this machine.