Compound Management
liquid handlers where they would ultimately be used. These innovations also led to a dramatic increase in the number of tubes that could be held in a tray and a new barcoding system for meticu- lous sample tracking.
Integrating software was also important. Our IT systems vendor teamed up with us and the other vendors to develop a software solution that could manage the entire process including sample order- ing, automated storage and retrieval, and the liquid handler protocols for screening. It also reports pro- cess results, such as compound quality and loca- tion, plate barcodes and inventory data. To break through what has been a technological barrier for acoustic liquid handling, our liquid han- dling vendor developed a novel platform with innovative hardware and software features to sup- port the transfer of samples from storage tubes. Additionally, it developed a complementary robot- ic platform to seamlessly integrate its acoustic liq- uid handler with tube- and microplate-handling devices in one modular system for a streamlined and contained process optimised for maximum throughput and efficiency. Technology development and validation for this completely novel approach has taken two years, and we will start to deploy this new solution at AstraZeneca this year.
New capabilities
The improvements from this new integrated approach will be significant. According to our models, the workflow will be able to support more than 70 high-throughput screening campaigns each
year, a sizable increase from our previous approach. Automated storage and retrieval capaci- ty will increase four-fold from 20,000 to 80,000 samples per day and using high-density trays that each hold 1,280 acoustic dispensing tubes will enable 100,000 samples to be plated in just 30 hours for a typical primary screening campaign. By creating a completely non-contact workflow using solely acoustic dispensing liquid handlers, rather than the current industry standard, a hybrid of contact and non-contact dispensing, we antici- pate a 10-fold reduction in sample volume across all assays3,4. The fully-acoustic solution, with its groundbreaking acoustic tube design and innova- tive acoustic liquid handling technology, will streamline many processes and reduce the number of steps needed within compound management to generate plates for screening. For an organisation that runs as many assays as AstraZeneca, that rep- resents significant cost savings.
By increasing compound access at our major research hubs, each site will hold the most relevant section of the company’s library for its scientific requirements. Each site will have lower volumes of each sample, but because of the miniaturisation made possible by acoustic dispensing technology, those samples will last much longer. The risk to our 150,000 endangered compounds, for example, has been completely removed. Indeed, this shift would not have been possible without such a degree of miniaturisation; there is simply not enough build- ing space at some of our sites to store as many as one million compounds in the volumes that would otherwise be needed for so many screens.
High-density storage trays holding sample tubes compatible with acoustic liquid handling Drug Discovery World Winter 2017/18 19
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