Compound Management


AstraZeneca has more than


two million compounds at its disposal. Prior to this technology innovation,


approximately 150,000 of those compounds were at risk of depletion


and vendors will be an important element in deliv- ering scientific impact from these investments.


Opportunity


As drug discovery scientists generate new biologi- cal screening data about a host of targets, there is a pressing need to improve the management of compounds. Since no company has unlimited access to compounds, ensuring that the available samples last as long as possible is essential for safe- guarding the success of future screens when new targets emerge.


The challenged that faced us – one that will be familiar to any scientist involved in drug discovery – was increasing our capacity for high-throughput screening without depleting our compound library. AstraZeneca has more than two million compounds at its disposal, with approximately 150,000 at risk of depletion, and a cost of replacement of $50 to $100 per compound. At the same time, we continue to seek new collaborations with academic institu- tions and other external organisations. Each new project increases the number of high-throughput screening campaigns we would like to run. Addressing this challenge involved several sepa- rate technical goals. In order to achieve the aspira- tion of being able to select any compound for any screen we needed more rapid automated storage and retrieval capabilities. Miniaturisation was also necessary to make each compound last for many more screens. Ideally, scientists at the company’s major research hubs would have local access to key


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compounds, rather than having to request them from a central facility and have them shipped. That would require a different approach to store more samples in the same equipment footprint and con- serve sample volumes across multiple locations. These were not trivial tasks. If they could be accomplished, though, it would result in work- flows that would be much more amenable to the kind of smart screening we hope to deploy.


Technical approach We recognised that a complex project like this could not be solved by a single technology plat- form or vendor. We approached vendors with whom we had established long-standing relation- ships for compound storage and retrieval (Brooks Life Sciences), liquid handling (Labcyte) and IT systems (Titian Software) and addressed the chal- lenge together. In addition to having the vendors work closely with AstraZeneca during this project, it was essential that they also worked in partner- ship so that any solutions would be integrated and fully automated, without the pitfalls of incompati- ble software or hardware, or requiring manual intervention to go from one platform to another. In one major step, we transitioned the liquid handling approach toward trays of tubes, rather than traditional microplates. This required our liq- uid handling vendor to work hand-in-glove with our tube manufacturer, crafting specialised tubes compatible not only with the compound storage infrastructure but also with the acoustic dispensing


Drug Discovery World Winter 2017/18


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