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A hot microplate
March 2012
EDIT CONNECT
SHARING OPTIONS:
POWAY, Calif.—Brooks Life Science Systems
(BLSS) is entering
into a partnership with the Scripps Research
Institute to jointly complete the
development of a microplate imaging system to evaluate the quality of compounds
during drug discovery.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Peter Policastro, senior director of business
development
for the Scripps Research Institute, explains that BLSS proved to be an
attractive partner for the collaboration because "it is a leader in
the field
of laboratory automation equipment and instrumentation."
In addition to teaming up to finish
development of the
microplate imaging system created by Scripps Research, Policastro said the
partnership also will enable BLSS to manufacture and
commercialize the imaging
system.
John Lillig, senior vice president and managing director of
BLSS, says the company is looking forward to its collaboration with the Scripps
Research's Compound Management Group on the development and the
commercialization of this compound quality assurance technology.
"With more than 350
million samples stored in Brooks' Sample
Management Systems around the world, the new Plate Auditor will complement our
Brooks Tube Auditor and be a
valuable new quality enhancement tool for our
compound management customers," he says.
Lillig
says that initially, the goal of the partnership is
to work closely with Dr. Peter Hodder's group at Scripps to complete the
development and then pick
up the commercialization of the high-performance
Plate Auditor system that was developed by Hodder and his group at Scripps.
"We will then work with the team to explore other areas
where progress could be made in the automation and
efficiency improvement of
the overall drug discovery process," Lillig says.
Hodder, who is
senior director and head of lead
identification at the Florida campus of Scripps Research, explains that the
technology "was developed to address an
unmet need in our compound management
operation—the automated assessment of compound quality in plate-based HTS
libraries. Both HTS and compound
management staff now consider it indispensable
for routine quality control of cherry-picked samples as well as periodic
monitoring of sample quality
across all our screening libraries."
"This is the first instrument of its kind and first in its
class," Hodder adds. "As a detection platform, it provides a wealth of
information about a compound sample that you simply couldn't get from one
instrument."
Hodder says he hopes the new technology gets people thinking
about Scripps
Florida in a new way.
"We want people to know that in addition to discovering
therapeutic molecules, we can also design and
build novel instrumentation for
screening operations," says Hodder, who founded and has directed the
high-throughput screening laboratory at Scripps
Florida since 2005. "With the
automation of these previously laborious, error-prone measurements, compound
managers and screening scientists will
waste less time cherry-picking and
screening 'expired' compound samples, thus improving the quality of data
emerging from HTS efforts. Application of
this technology will immediately
impact compound management and HTS lab productivity, as well as downstream drug
discovery efforts."
The new instrument made its debut at the first Society for
Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) in February in San Diego. Hodder
will be presenting the new HIAPI-CM at a
European Lab Automation
Conference in
May.
According to Hodder, the timing couldn't have been better
for the
collaboration between Scripps and BLSS.
"Through mergers and acquisitions, pharmaceutical
companies
have inherited legacy screening collections that need to be assessed for
quality before they are screened," he notes. "The concurrent
expansion of HTS
operations in the academic, biotech and CRO domains has resulted in the distribution
of compound collections around the world."
Lillig agrees, adding that the Plate Auditor technology
represents the very first development of a
system that can automatically,
without human interpretation, assess the quality and integrity of the thousands
of samples to be routinely tested by
each drug discovery lab in their
high-throughput/high-content screening operations.
Ultimately,
the benchmark for success will be financial
results, and Policastro says that will be marked "by achievement of significant
market penetration in an
expeditious manner."
Lillig adds that the partners have "already received a
significant level
of genuine interest in this important product from a number
of major pharmaceutical drug discovery groups around the world, and as such, we
are very
pleased to see this partnership already getting off to a very
successful start."
Code: E0031211 Back |
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