omation mbers - Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening

WP030
Kurt Lund
ACESystems, Inc.
135 Sixth Street
Del Mar, California 92014
klund@abac.com
The HTS Compound-Thawing Bottle Neck (and How to Avoid it With a New Processor)
In terms of laboratory HTS efficiency, the thawing requirement for stored compounds presents itself as a huge
bottleneck…until now with the advent of the new Thawing Processor System (TPS) from ACESystems, Inc. In the
present paper the thawing behavior of solvents frozen in microplates is investigated in two types of experiments:
(1) conventional thawing on the bench, and (2) rapid thawing with the TPS. It is also discussed how the TPS
allows wells to be thawed, individually without disturbing the other wells in the plate, thus preserving precious
compounds. The clearest observation from the bench tests (1) is that solvents in the wells remain largely frozen
for hours after plate-removal from the freezer. Thus, for a center well of a 96-well microplate, even 3 hours was
not enough time to effect 100% thawing on the bench. The rapid thawing experiment (2) was conducted using
computer feedback control with the TPS. For DMSO in a standard one-ml well, frozen to -5˚ C, this resulted in
100% thawing in only 31⁄2 minutes, without causing excessive temperatures to the solvent. Overall, it is concluded
that there can be great enhancement to laboratory efficiency with the Thawing Processor System, as well as large
savings in compound preservation by thawing only selected wells in a microplate, instead of the whole plate.
WP031
Joseph Machamer
Molecular Devices
1311 Orleans Drive
Sunnyvale, California 94089-1136
joe_machamer@moldev.com
206
Co-Author(s)
Greg Kazan,
Molecular Devices
Tom Onofrey, Millipore Corp.
Recent Developments in High Throughput, Turn-Key Solubility, and Permeability Compound
Ranking Assays
When combined with data from primary screening assays, measurement of the physiochemical properties of new
chemical entities can provide a basis for the ranking of compounds based on their potential to be developed
into viable drug candidates. The strategy of ranking the developability of new chemical entities (NCE) based on
characterization by high throughput characterization of compound solubility and permeability is increasingly being
applied in the drug discovery industry. We have developed automatable, turn-key assays to measure solubility and
permeability that use Millipore membrane technology and a Molecular Devices SpectraMax absorbance microplate
reader. The benefits of this approach include good correlation with low throughput, “gold standard” assays, no
methods development, automation friendliness, reduced need for instrument expertise, and software flagging of
data validity.