Technical poster describes challenges and advantages gained from the development of a flexible automation platform for plate replication and cell-based screening for a Swiss pharmaceutical company
Velocity11 has made available a technical poster reprint describing the challenges overcome and advantages gained from the development of a flexible automation platform for plate replication and cell-based screening for a major Swiss pharmaceutical company.
Many pharmaceutical screening groups maintain vast compound libraries to generate high quality 'hits' and lead optimisation information for further investigation as potential drug candidates.
These groups must rapidly and efficiently identify the compounds that offer the best potential to be effective lifesaving drugs.
This can only be accomplished by combining cutting edge computational, automation, and screening techniques to rapidly mine through the large chemical libraries and ever-increasing number of targets to find the best match.
The poster reprint describes how the pharmaceutical company collaborated with Velocity11 to design and build a fully automated system, based upon the versatile BioCel platform, that could grow with changing technology and assay types, offer the ability to run unattended with throughputs from 300,000 to over 1,000,000 wells per day and perform cell-based screening in 1536-well plates.
This advancement has enabled the customer to streamline its procedure for source plate replication in preparation for high throughput screening.
Through the extensive hardware and software development accomplished by this project, the high throughput screening process has also become more automated and integrated with the in-house Lims system.
As a result the automation system has been integrated with processes, databases, and software already in place.
For a copy of the poster reprint 'Creating a flexible automation platform for plate replication and cell-based screening' please contact Velocity11.
The BioCel automation system delivers the functionality of much larger systems in an efficient innovative package optimised for speed.
The BioCel is a fully capable sample-processing platform for assembling genomics reactions, dispensing samples for compound preparation or processing biological samples in screening applications.
The system's real-time scheduler supports multiple plate formats and labware, multiple protocols, and linear and parallel process flows, while the software architecture accommodates expansion of the system to include additional modules and access to new third party devices.
Velocity11, recently ranked 146 among the 2004 500 list, is privately held and focused on automation technology for life science laboratories.
The company's customers include most of the major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as leading genome centers and academic institutions.
