Companies join forces in screening solution technology

BASEL, Switzerland—In January, three companies announced a partnership integrating their respective flagship products into a “seamless solution” designed to automate iterative drug discovery processes for designing and planning, testing and data analysis. Swiss company Genedata, Massachusetts-based HighRes Biosolutions and London-based Titian Software have entered into an industry-first collaboration that streamlines workflow from sample logistics to automation to real-time analysis.

 

Initially, HighRes and Titian connected their products Cellario and Mosaic to automatically interpret and produce Mosaic-defined work, replication and jobs. Next, Titian and Genedata integrated Mosaic with Genedata Screener to automatically retrieve assay plate sample data from Mosaic. Most recently, Cellario was integrated with Genedata Screener for real-time data analysis of Cellario experiment results. This integration of all three solutions will effectively close the loop on logistics, production and data analysis, the companies say.

 

“Our partnership brings together best-in-class solutions relied on by the world’s leading pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies and CROs,” said Edmund Wilson, CEO of Titian Software. “Moreover, we are empowering researchers to quickly and easily perform complex informatics workflows, which typically span many departments and informatics resources.”

 

With the integrated product, screening scientists can now design and order assay plates in the Titian Mosaic sample management software, accept and run the fully automated screening process on the HighRes automated system and trigger the automated data analysis and approval in Genedata Screener. The integration is inherently flexible and significantly improves the efficiency of research processes while providing a full audit trail for data, samples and operations, saving researchers time and energy, decreasing the margin of errors and removing obstacles in the workflow.

 

“A major advantage for us is the way we feed parameters from Mosaic orders to customize the protocol for the task at hand automatically,” noted Ira Hoffman, president of HighRes Biosolutions. “This greatly simplifies an operator’s job. Our customers have been able to reduce the number of different protocols from more than 200 to fewer than 10, which demonstrates the significant time-savings and overall improvement in operational efficiency for our shared compound management customers.”

 

The three partners recently demonstrated their combined screening solution at the SLAS2018 (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) conference in San Diego in a tutorial called “Partnering to Close the Screening Loop: From Sample Logistics to Automation to Analysis and Back.”

 

Founded in 1997, Genedata is headquartered in Switzerland and has offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States. The company transforms data into intelligence with innovative software solutions and domain-specific consulting services that automate complex, large-scale experimental processes and enable organizations to maximize the return on investment from their R&D. Just one of their many products, Genedata Screener is designed streamline workflows, reduce costs and lower maintenance efforts by using one single analysis platform for all current and future screening technologies. It enables more reliable results and deepened knowledge, saves time and minimizes hassle by reducing manual errors and interpretation mistakes and allows teams to securely share data using internal servers, hosted servers or the cloud and leverage internal and external collaborations at all levels. Genedata Screener scales from small data sets to massive experiments and is designed to import data from any screening instrument, making it a useful tool for pharmaceutical companies, CROs and academic research institutions.

 

Started in 2004 as High Resolution Engineering, HighRes Biosolutions is based in Beverly, Mass., with offices in the Boston area and on the West Coast, as well as in the United Kingdom. The company developed a proprietary scheduling software package, Cellario, for control of all robotics platforms. Its dynamic scheduling capabilities and advanced flow control options allow for the best of both static and dynamic scheduling domains, and on-the-fly error recovery and protocol modification allow users to handle any situation that may arise in the lab environment. HighRes designs and builds innovative laboratory automation systems, dynamic scheduling software and lab automation instruments that accelerate and streamline discovery. HighRes offers highly flexible, modular solutions that provide its clients with the ability to scale and reconfigure their automation equipment as their assays or technology changes.

 

Based in London, Titian Software was founded in 1999, with a presence in Europe, the United States and the Far East. Mosaic is Titian’s customizable, modular software to control and monitor all aspects of sample storage and preparation for compounds, reagents and biologics. Companies worldwide use Mosaic to provide a seamless, error-free sample supply chain by offering simplified operations within the lab, thorough audit trails and improvements in sample conservation, as well as management of diverse sample types from small molecule compounds to tissue collections. Titian’s SampleBank and FreezerManagement provide optimized and pre-configured subsets of Mosaic available for rapid deployment.