CRS Adds a Human Feel to Pharmaceutical Automation

Ligand Pharmaceuticals' New Leads Discovery department adopted a workstation approach to automating its screening assays in order to increase productivity. This approach stressed optimizing assay work flow and implementing stacking workstations, which allowed capacity to increase tremendously. However, this approach required operator intervention, therefore ultimate capacity was limited by head count and available hours for operating the equipment. A fully automated robotics system for performing the cell-based screening assays would allow for increased capacity without an increase in labor. In effect, the new system provides an operator-less second shift. System requirements included modularity and flexible scheduling software so that the system would complement the existing work flow in the lab, as well as afford rapid assay development and deployment. Ligand's cell-based screening assays require assay cell plates to be incubated at a constant temperature, relative humidity and CO 2 (37° C, 95%, 5%, respectively). The robot must be able to rapidly access the cell plates without perturbing the incubator environment.