Noemí Tabanera, Juan B. García, Francisco Asensio, Alicia Robles, Genoveva Mateos, Patricia Prieto, Pilar Ramos, Angeles Redondo, José R. Tormo and Fernando Peláez.
CIBE (Centro de Investigación Básica), Merck Sharp & Dohme de España S.A. Josefa Valcárcel, 38; 28027 Madrid, Spain.
The Natural Products effort at CIBE covers the initial steps of the current research program on new AntiInfectives at Merck. Since the introduction, in October 2005, of a new high-throughput platform for the preparation and evaluation of extracts from fungi or actinomycetes, the number of extracts processed has increased considerably. Current numbers reach the 20,000 complex extracts evaluated per month.
| After primary screening assays some of the extracts are selected for being confirmed. The unexpected growth in the number of extracts made necessary an automated way of managing these extracts whose activities needed to be confirmed and tested in our secondary screening platforms.
| 
Fig. 1 Biomek FX + Cytomat platform |
In response to this challenge, a new system was proposed for performing a fully automated Cherry Picking at CIBE. The initial objectives were to avoid manual procedures and reduce the risks of mistakes by using barcodes. To decrease the manpower needed per extract for primary screening was a secondary benefit of the system where the active extracts are transferred between positions of 96 deep-well plates with a robot.
For this new process, the robot selected for the development of the application and workflow was determined to be a Biomek® FX + Cytomat platform, due to its availability in the lab and the capability of this equipment to manage high numbers of plates without human interaction.
A key obstacle in the implementation of the new automated Cherry Picking resulted to be the impossibility of finding a commercial solution. Requirements of connecting our Oracle databases to determine which were the source and destination positions, and the idea of tracking any plate by barcodes forced us to design a proprietary VB application as a way to create working lists and send "ready to use data" to the robot.
Click here for this presentation (PDF)
|
