TTP LabTech has announced that it has completed a three-year laboratory automation project with AstraZeneca.
The project involved the design and build of a fully automated system for salt and polymorph screening of novel compounds.
The system completed its site acceptance test (SAT) late last year before coming on-line at AstraZeneca's research facility in Sodertalje, Sweden.
This system for synthesising and analysing crystalline materials was designed in partnership between AstraZeneca and TTP LabTech.
The overall objectives were to increase throughput, to explore experimental space efficiently and reliably and to automate the analysis of huge amounts of data.
The project has been undertaken in stages, the first of which was a prototyping stage.
This helped to minimise risk by tackling those design elements that carried the greatest number of unknowns early in the project.
The next stage was the full design and build of a single screening machine to demonstrate control, functionality, and consistency of the basic automated polymorph screening processes.
TTP LabTech has since been asked to replicate the entire system in order to double the overall throughput.
