Real time PCR - European Pharmaceutical Review

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2009 LAB AUTOMATION
Article 1:
Lab Automation series
Dr Sheraz Gul, Vice President and Head of Biology, European ScreeningPort
Welcome to the first Drug Discovery Developments section of European Pharmaceutical Review
Digital. The purpose of the updates is to bring to the attention of the reader advances that have been
made in the life science and pre-clinical Drug Discovery research efforts. Case studies will be
discussed in relation to topics that offer the potential to increase the efficiency and likelihood of
success in Drug Discovery. In this edition, advances in the design and development of automation
solutions for High Throughput Screening (HTS) will be discussed.
The use of small molecule
libraries in HTS campaigns to
identify compounds that are
capable of modulating the activity of
the target under investigation has for
the previous decade been widely
exploited by the pharmaceutical
industry. More recently, screening has
also been adopted by others such as
academic research organisations.
A key requirement for executing HTS
campaigns is access to a compound
library. There are significant
differences in the sizes of the
compound libraries that the
pharmaceutical industry and
academic research organisations
possess or have access to and this
trend is likely to continue for reasons
such as the significant costs
associated with the acquisition of the
libraries, the requirement to purchase
and maintain an appropriate and
reliable hardware and IT
infrastructure to manage the libraries,
the need to perform appropriate
quality control experiments on the
compounds to monitor their integrity
and replacing deteriorated or
depleted stocks. These extra
functionalities require significant
financial investment which usually
can only be fully funded by the
pharmaceutical industry. As a result
of the variation in the sizes of
compound libraries, researchers
require varying degrees of automated
solutions. In those cases where a few
‘‘There are significant
differences in the sizes of the
compound libraries that the
pharmaceutical industry and
academic research
organisations possess or have
access to and this trend is
likely to continue for reasons
such as the significant costs
associated with the
acquisition of the libraries’’
relatively simple manual tasks are
carried out, off the shelf solutions are
usually sufficient. At the other
extreme, there may be a need to cater
for throughputs in excess of 100,000
tests per day. In such cases, suppliers
are often required to provide custom
made solutions and they can be (i) in
the form of an integrated package
from a variety of suppliers or (ii) an
entire solution provided by a sole
supplier. The solutions for those
requiring complex high throughput
capabilities inevitably end up being
financially costly not just in terms of
their initial purchase price, but also in
terms of preventative maintenance
and service contracts.
High Content Screening
In the pharmaceutical industry, High
Content Screening (HCS) is becoming
firmly established and increases the
repertoire of technologies that are
envisaged to aid the reduction in the
high attrition rates in Drug Discovery.
All too often, the identification of
compounds that exhibit the ability to
modulate the activity of a
therapeutically relevant target in
isolation fail to translate their
behavior when evaluated in a cellular
context. Compounds identified from
screening activities against libraries
carried out in a HCS setting may be
better starting points for drug
discovery efforts.
Whereas up until recently HCS
was used after the execution of an
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