Accelerating Time to Market Through Digitalisation
Drug Discovery World
May 22, 2023
Heightened regulatory demands, increasingly competitive markets, more challenging emergency medical needs, and remote working (underscored during Covid) — are just a few of the pressures on current drug discovery and development. The R&D community’s response to these pressures is, in part, investing even more in laboratory automation, such as mobile robots or liquid handlers, enabling fully automated cell culture, protein purification, screening assay execution, and sample logistics systems. All these investments intend to shorten project cycle times and get better-qualified leads into clinical development faster.
However, automation of experimental wet lab execution does not fill the funnel faster and better. To achieve this, you need to enable true end-to-end automation, including the digitalisation of your automation workflows, so that everything from the experimental setup to reporting the analysed results happens with minimal human intervention. Digitalisation is requisite in three key areas:
- automatic data capture and transfer
- automating data processing and analysis (from the simplest to the most complex assays)
- autonomous decision-making