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."