The soundwaves heralding a new era of smart screening

简介: Our drug discovery capabilities are advancing at pace and in order to keep up with them, vital underlying industrial processes such as sample management also need to evolve. Our pioneering acoustic tube technology, 与主要合作伙伴共同开发, is enabling us to handle and process millions of compounds for biological screening with greater speed, 精度, 效率, 敏捷性和可持续性.

The critical enabler of drug discovery

Drug discovery technologies are not only advancing with unprecedented speed, they are also reaching new heights of sophistication and with this comes the need for a sophisticated high-throughput way of orchestrating what samples are needed for which experiment.

Sample management – the handling and processing of chemical compounds for high-throughput screening and experimentation – is a critical enabler in drug discovery. 预计到2023年, 50 million samples a year will need to be accessed for screening compared to only 22 million a year in 2018. As such, it must be armed and ready for the extraordinary escalation.

什么是声管?

Acoustics (sound waves) have been deployed in sample management for some time – but only to transfer samples from multi-well storage plates into the eventual assay plate. The first ‘intermediate plates’ still had to be mechanically filled using pipette tips.

Our vision was to achieve a fully acoustic sample management solution, streamlining the entire process and eliminating the need for intermediate plates and tip-based dispensing. And by collaborating with three partners, Brooks Life Sciences (compound storage and retrieval specialists), Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (specialists in consumables and instruments for acoustic liquid handling) and Titian Software, our acoustic tube project was born.

今天, this approach is accelerating our process solutions for both hit discovery and lead optimisation research whilst driving miniaturisation in synthesis and screening assay platforms.¹

The benefits of acoustic tube technology for fast and 非常高效。 sample handling

Our pioneering acoustic tube technology enables:

• Unparalleled data quality via accurate, precise and contactless sample dispensing
• Faster sample selection and retrieval, to meet escalating demand
• Minimal wastage of samples, ensuring greater long-term sustainability

参考文献

1. Green等. 今天的药物发现2020. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359644620303895?via%3Dihub