Agreements

Mass spectrometry is used to quantify the amount of drug substance in screening assays, drug metabolism studies, and safety and efficacy experiments.  The Labcyte Echo® acoustic liquid handling system uses sound waves to dispense a wide variety of liquids in nanoliter increments.

The development of an instrument that enables the delivery of test samples into a mass spectrometer through acoustic dispensing will generate better results with lower costs compared to traditional systems, which can be prone to transfer errors and sample contamination. It will streamline the process required to carry out these activities while increasing capacity to enable use in screening.

The drug discovery process requires continued advancement to generate greater biologically relevant data at lower costs and faster throughput. Data rich, label-free assays and broader phenotypic analyses are viewed as critical requirements to the future success of drug discovery programs. This trend requires novel techniques to meet these challenges. Mass spectrometry is an ideal candidate from a data perspective, but current throughput and cost per data point prevent the technology from being fully exploited. The goal of this collaboration is to overcome these limitations by enabling analysis of samples transferred directly from standard microplates with throughput significantly higher than current commercially available systems with substantially lower cost per data point.