HappyTools: A software for high-throughput HPLC data processing and quantitation

High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is widely used for absolute quantitation. The advent of new columns and HPLC technology has enabled higher sample throughput, and hence, larger scale studies that perform quantitation on different sample types (e.g. healthy controls vs. patients with rheumatoid arthritis) using HPLC are becoming feasible. However, there remains a lack of methods that can analyse the increased number of HPLC samples. To address this in part, the modular toolkit HappyTools has been developed for the high-throughput targeted quantitation of HPLC measurements. HappyTools enables the user to create an automated workflow that includes retention time (t(r)) calibration, data extraction and the calculation of several quality criteria for data curation. HappyTools has been tested on a biopharmaceutical standard and previously published clinical samples. The results show comparable accuracy between HappyTools, Waters Empower and ThermoFisher Chromeleon. However, HappyTools offered superior precision and throughput when compared with Waters Empower and ThermoFisher Chromeleon. HappyTools is released under the Apache 2.0 license, both the source code and a Windows binary can be freely downloaded from https://github.com/Tarskin/HappyTools.