A client wants to know which substances yield antibiological activity in some hay samples. The assignment fits within KAIN's service "What is the composition of my product or the product from my competitor". Therefore, KAIN decided to accept the assignment, but because of its complexity and the limited budget, on a "no cure, no pay" basis.
It soon turns out that the assignment is to difficult and can't be finalised within the available budget, because:
- No suitable blank samples are available, which makes it impossible to distinghuish matrix substances from target substances
- Samples are pretreatment by the customer in a confidential way, the reproducibility of this process is unclear
- The obtained sample extracts are practically insoluble and therefore can't be analysed by the available identifying GC-MS and LC-TOF instruments.
After 2 days struggling KAIN decides to discontinue the research activities and returns the order to the client. This time the search for the needle in a haystack didn't pay off. To the client, no fee was charged.
