The increasing need for improved efficiency, precision and 24/7 operation imply more and more sophisticated measures in laboratory automation. This is true for a variety of fields – from pharmaceutical to food, agricultural, and the petrochemical industry, as well as forensics and medical diagnostics. Chemical and biological tests have to be supported by very small individual samples in medicine and forensics, up to continuous flow production with inline quality control in the chemical industry. A vast variety of physical, chemical, and biological methods need to be supported by experiment design and control, data acquisition and evaluation, documentation as well as simulation. Time constraints, high performance, extensive resource utilisation, and reproducibility of results demand a high degree of automation including unmanned operation. Global collaborations within multinational companies are the order of the day. Regulatory compliance with its diversity of validation processes increases the complexity of tasks. In addition, laboratory automation is no longer limited to R&D or production laboratories; it is now totally integrated into almost all production systems in a globalised enterprise. Adequate automation solutions always need the expertise of domain experts and automation specialists.

With ever mounting market pressure on industries, from increasing global competition, along with consumer desire for value for money and improved performance results there is a greater driving force to stay one step ahead by reducing product time to market. This enforced impetus has many companies having to continually improve existing formulations and launch new products in order to expand their product portfolio and market share.

Lab Automation Roundtable: Driving lab automation forward

Automated systems and modern pharmaceuticals have both had a hugely positive impact on human life. While these technologies developed in parallel with one another during roughly the same time period in the early 20th century, they didn’t interact until automation found its way into the laboratory in the 1970s.

Laboratory automation in pharmaceutical research is an established technology, but what does the future hold for its role in R&D? European Pharmaceutical Review asked four industry experts for their views, and you can read what they had to say in this virtual round table discussion.

n the mid-1990s, HTS labs were equipped with high-end automation for screening tens of thousands of compounds while compound management labs continued to manually pick samples and invest in standalone equipment. The bottleneck for screening shifted from testing samples to distributing compounds. In order to solve this problem, Merck & Co., Inc., developed an automated compound distribution center. The facility uses automation from The Automation Partnership (TAP), and a Merck-developed compound ordering system to provide solid and solution samples to Merck scientists worldwide.

Compound management is an emerging discipline that represents a core component of the drug discovery process, from early phases involving high throughput screening (HTS) to late-stage lead optimisation screening cascades.