Cherry Picking

As the current wave of robotics approaches plateau levels, its impact on improving HTS and other drug discovery, biotech and biopharma processes, will over time, if not already, begin to decline. Pharma companies are beset by shrunken pipelines, and pressed for time. The drug discovery, development and research communities are eager to discover the real breakthrough in automation that will finally show them how to cut R&D costs, save cash, and compress time-to-market parameters. Rather than waiting to uncover the Rosetta stone for accelerating target investigation, big pharma are re-examining and analyzing the key facets for success. Some are shifting their major focus from robotics, increasing scale-up and precision ultra-high throughput - to refining the methodologies that enhance pure scientific research, and the quantification of the resulting data it generates.

However, for the foreseeable future, the trend in high-throughput screening in recent years that has been a mix of robotic automation and workstations will stay. High throughput screening has been defined as assays that test 50,000 to 1,000,000 compounds in one campaign. Depending on the format-96 well or 384 well- and hit rate objective, the next most critical function is hit picking or cherry picking. This involves taking all of the compounds that showed primary activity and doing some form of validation on those compounds. Any given microplate may have a few hits, many hits, or even no hits. To efficiently continue the development process, it is necessary to consolidate the hits from the various source plates into destination plates to simplify further analysis and development. This is called “hit consolidation”, “cherry picking”, or “hit picking”. These hits are the important precursors to potential drug candidates. Since the screening process generally involves testing large numbers of compounds from a library, the generation of hits is a mostly random process. The means to reformat the hits for further testing is a challenge.

Please contact ASTECH for their latest next generation approach to this sort of technology.