Laboratory Automation

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The Future of Laboratory Automation

The trend toward increasing miniaturization and higher throughput screening will no doubt continue. Cutting-edge developments not only include 1536 and denser microplate formats, but also emerging technologies such as microarrays, microfluidics, and lab-on-a-chip. The completion of the human genome is bringing about expansion in areas such as pharmacogenetics and proteomics. However, many of the fundamental core processes for drug development remain the same. Screening experiments must be performed in order to find the hits that are hidden among the millions of compounds in drug discovery libraries. Successful hits need to be further studied for ADME/TOX and in vivo efficiency along the long trail toward a final successful drug. Because of the variety of chemical structures involved and the complexity of the interactions, all of these processes require the "art" of science to be applied. This tends to resist automation, because assays need to be optimized with the application of human intelligence and decision-making. These assays require an extra step for "automation optimization". They can then be implemented to standardize and routinely execute large numbers of optimized experiments.

This rapidly changing environment combined with the need to develop new drugs as rapidly and efficiently as possible means that companies that are attempting to develop new drugs must be able to react quickly and to work efficiently. New knowledge and tools about concerns such as toxicity mean that hits may be discarded as candidates for continued work much earlier in the process. In order to successfully adapt themselves to this environment, their tools must be able to adapt as well. While the highly-automated large-scale lab automation systems will probably see continued use, the ever-increasing trend is towards the implementation of small workcells that can be rapidly configured, installed, brought into operation, and reconfigured when the need arises.

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