Sustainable High-Throughput Screening (HTS) in Drug Discovery

Sustainable High Throughput Screening (HTS) in Drug Discovery

Pharmaceutical companies strive to improve the quality of life of patients and to improve global health. Hence, pharmaceutic and life sciences industries are crucial to create value for society because their innovations lay the foundations for comprehensive health and longevity and thus, prosperity.

Nonetheless, the costs of developing new drugs have gone up significantly and fewer innovative drugs are hitting the market. As a result, reversing this tendency has become a primary objective for the pharmaceutical sector.

High throughput screening in drug discovery aims to screen more than 100,000 of compounds every day. Still, out of tens of thousands potential compounds, only one potential candidate could make to the market as functional drug.

Moreover, the pharmaceutic and life sciences industries continue to emit copious quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the increased urgency of reducing carbon emissions around the world, only little attention has been paid on the pharmaceutical sector, in terms of their contribution to the global carbon footprint. Consequently, this heightens focus and expectations towards the subject of sustainability in the pharmaceutical industry.

Reducing plastic waste, energy consumption, reagents, chemical waste, as well as implementing innovative technologies, automation in the processes, and miniaturization of high throughput screening methods, appear to be particularly important in making the drug development process more sustainable.

I.DOT HT Liquid Handler: One of a kind for sustainable high throughput screening in drug discovery

A High-Throughput Non-Contact Liquid Handling System with 384 source wells

The system uses eight individually controlled positive pressure channels to generate droplets from 4 to 50 nanoliters from a small hole at the bottom of a 384 source well plate. Each channel can generate up to 100 droplets per second, giving control and speed to the users. It can handle multiple liquid classes, has low dead volume and comes with the unique built-in droplet verification technology. The I.DOT HT Non-Contact Dispenser eliminates cross-contamination, reduces time and labour, and dispenses low and accurate reagents volumes. Overall, this significantly cuts costs on reagents and pipette tips, minimizes the handling error, and increases reliability and reproducibility. Thus, the I.DOT HT Non-Contact Dispenser provides fast, reliable, and accurate results in a drug discovery workflow.

With the I.DOT HT Liquid Dispenser, you can achieve:

Heightened efficiency

Thanks to the eight independent dispensing channels, you can achieve fast, highly accurate, and precise dispensing of a range of reagents and solutions including DMSO and up to 25% glycerol.

Maximized data quality

I.DOT technology enables samples as small as 4 nanoliters to be dispensed with the highest precision. Non-contact dispensing minimizes cross-contamination and maximizes the output data quality.

Greater flexibility

The I.DOT HT Non-Contact Dispenser can accommodate 384 different samples and can hold liquids up to 80µl per single sample. Thus, highly complex dispensing protocols can be executed. Also, multiple experiment target plates can be processed within minutes of time.

Full control

With I.DOT HT Non-Contact DIspenser’s own software "Assay studio," the users can integrate the I.DOT HT into a fully  automated workflow, and design a complex dispensing run with ease.

I.DOT HT contribute to the sustainable drug discovery by:

• Significantly reducing the cost on reagents and consumables
• Minimizing the utilization of plastic wastes, such as. pipette tips and screening plates
• Reducing energy consumption and costs by providing fast and accurate dispensing of complex protocols
• Minimizing the reagent usage in compound library preparation and compound screening
• Maximizing the throughput by providing the flexibility to use up to 1536 well plate as a target plate
• Increasing the data quality by accurate and precise dispensing of low range volumes

Download our brochure to bring benefits to your lab today.

Read our blog post on Simple Steps to Greener Laboratory.