How Robots Are Improving Pharma Research
June 06 2018 - 11:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Daniela Hernandez
The scientist hunched over beakers, conducting drug research by
hand, may soon be a memory.
Companies like Eli Lilly & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC are
investing in automation with the hope of transforming drug
discovery from an enterprise where humans do manual experiments to
one where robots handle thousands of samples around the clock. This
automation will be key to developing better therapies more
efficiently, drug companies say, as research and development
becomes more labor intensive amid the push toward more-tailored
medicines.
Robots are attractive to pharmaceutical companies because
they're "relentless...they never stop," says Peter Harris, chief
executive of HighRes Biosolutions, a Beverly, Mass.,-based company
that supplies automated systems for pharmaceutical clients. The
software that controls the machines "is able to keep track of many
more things in parallel than a human."
Lilly recently put $90 million into a new 300,000-square-foot
research center in San Diego, where robots are helping to speed up
the pace of scientific discovery. In one installation, four
glass-enclosed robotic arms grow cells, isolate DNA, and place
samples into roughly postcard-sized plastic "plates" that resemble
miniature muffin trays. They also shuttle these between various
equipment, like measuring machines and incubators, said Dan
Skovronsky, president of Lilly's research labs.
"Ultimately, we want to have humans focus mainly on what they're
best at: thinking and strategy rather than mixing and purifying and
shaking [samples], which humans do today," he said. "It's not a
strategy to reduce our scientific headcount."
Since launching the facility a year ago, the company has already
seen a more-than-fivefold increase in its capacity to screen
antibodies, said Dr. Skovronsky. The company is testing these
proteins as potential therapies for diseases like cancer and
diabetes as well as brain disorders and pain. (None is ready for
human testing yet.) By year's end, he hopes the company will have
tested 50,000 antibodies, spanning 30 to 40 different research
projects.
Lilly worked with San Diego-based BioSero Inc., another
laboratory automation company, to build the robots that inhabit its
new facility.
Robotics is also helping companies get more out of their
experiments, according to Philip Dell'Orco, vice president for
advanced manufacturing technologies at GSK, which is using robots
in screening drug candidates for respiratory and infectious
diseases, cancer and inflammation.
Reproducibility is a big problem in science, and automation
could, in theory, help with that, he said. Robots can get more data
from each experiment, and because robots can do the same task in
precisely the same way, every test run should be uniform,
increasing the value of that information.
Companies are also interested in applying machine learning to
drug discovery, he said, and more uniform results could also
improve the insights such software systems yield because they are
"only as good as the data."
Write to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 06, 2018 11:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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