SLAS 2019 Americas Sample Management Symposium

Improving clinical success rates is a key objective in the pharmaceutical industry, and discovery science platforms continue to deploy new strategies aimed at improving success and translation to the clinic. As with others, we recognized that applying the more relevant cellular translational assays at the earliest points in discovery could allow better decisions earlier in the discovery process, and enable the identification of molecules with improved clinical translation In practice, this opportunity would not only be limited to primary cell or mixed cell culture based translational assays, but could also include broader use of organoids, spheroids, iPSC’s and edited cell lines. However, the costs, the complexity of biology, and especially the limited scalability of cells, limit how these can be used at a scale compatible with high-throughput plate-based HTS formats. We embarked on an ambitious campaign to evaluate ultra low volume platforms that would enable broader use of quantity-limited cell. These technologies have been a focus in the screening field for the past decade, so our work was aligned to evaluate these platforms for use in discovery. A key finding of our evaluation was that the biology is remarkably robust, and the fidelity of the biology was retained in most of the ultraminiaturized experiments. However, while many of the technologies show promise, these are not yet robust production platforms, and technologies for delivering compounds still needs to be addressed.