Lena Schober, Moriz Walter, Andrea Traube, Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, Department Laboratory Automation and Biomanufacturing Engineering, Stuttgart
The use of cell-based assays in pharmaceutical industry and academic research is a growing trend that is a driving force to reduce costs for drug development. Academic research is gaining information about intracellular targets or functional mechanisms through the variety of different assays. These benefits can be used in preclinical studies and furthermore costly late-stage drug failures may be reduced by the use of cell-based assays. The use of automated systems is also in great demand and will change the testing of substances and research activities. Nevertheless, there are a lot of barriers at the moment limiting the successful application of automated systems in this field. By the lack of flexibility and the demand for skilled computer scientists & engineers just the two main aspects stated by experts shall be mentioned.
Our strong background on automated cell culture technologies and expertise, gained in several projects, let us rethink the overall process chain and overcome established principles. A new service orientated platform for the execution of cell-based assays that are commonly used will be introduced. The main idea is to give access to automated infrastructure for academic research or spin-offs which cannot afford the special infrastructure.
User have 24/7 access to automated infrastructure through a web based configurator. Standard predefined validated assays can be easily selected or individual assays can be composed with an intuitive software configurator. The platform will inform you about the next free time slot to execute your experiment. Intermediate step or end results can be discovered immediately after the process, in a secure data cloud. Through automation and closed data record results are more reproducible and comparable. This dynamic access to automation offers high flexibility for low throughput experiments and will push high quality research and drug development in early stage.