EPM speaks to Nigel Skinner, Marketing Director at Andrew Alliance about how automation is being used throughout the pharma industry and how it is helping bring new drugs to market faster.
Automated systems can be thought of as largely being linked to packaging and inspection processes but what about their use in the lab to help advance things like drug discovery?
Automation continues to find increased adoption within the drug discovery groups of not just large pharmaceutical companies but also smaller companies, including start-ups. An initial obvious fit was in high throughput screening (HTS) labs, to identify hits from compound libraries that may become leads for medicinal chemistry optimisation. Covid-19 has seen significant growth in the adoption of automation to accelerate vaccine development, especially at the lab bench, where the need for versatile, easy to use automation to replace laborious manual pipetting has never been greater. A key driver is to reduce error rates whilst freeing up highly skilled analysts for higher level tasks.