Abstract
CRS Robotics Acquires IRSA Systemtechnik
CRS Robotics Corporation, announces the acquisition of IRSA Systemtechnik GMBH (Darmstadt, Germany). This merger combines CRS's strong position as a supplier of automated robotic systems with IRSA's established line of machine vision systems.
“An integral part of our corporate plan has been the development of strategic alliances with technologies that compliment our existing products,” said Raymond Simmons, CRS Chief Executive Officer. “This acquisition dramatically strengthens our overall position and represents a major step in CRS's goal to become the market leader in human-scale robotics and machine vision technology.”
“IRSA brings an extensive amount of laboratory automation experience to CRS,” said Enis Ersü, President of IRSA Systemtechnik. “That experience, coupled with the high degree of quality control that CRS places on it robotic arms and systems, will rapidly put the company at the forefront of automated clinical testing,”
In pharmaceutical laboratories, CRS automated systems are used by companies such as Bayer, Bristol Myers and Merck for high throughput screening (HTS), combinatorial chemistry, compound dissolution and genome sequencing. CRS robots are also used for machine-loading, material handling, packaging and parts assembly by a wide range of companies that includes BMW, General Motors, IBM, AT & T and 3M. IRSA's line of machine vision instrumentation is also widely used for object recognition and position determination for robot guidance in such tasks as quality inspection and package inspection. CRS is currently developing robotic and machine vision systems for the electronics industry and expects to have products available in 1997.
University of Western Ontario Completes Simulation Study in a Chemistry Reception Area
Delays in sample processing within a specimen reception area occur when technologists or centrifuges are rate limiting. Ralph Henderson and his associates at University of Western Ontario directly measured capacity factors and the stages in specimen processing (times for centrifuge load and unload of individual tubes, routine and STAT data entry, and labeling a tube). They used this information to ascertain the effect of reducing technologist staffing and available centrifuge capacity on processing delays by means of a simulation study.
Henderson's simulation program, written in Turbo Pascal, utilized discrete event modeling that uses the arrival of a specimen to initiate a set of capacity-limited processes described above. We collected actual STAT and routine specimen arrival times between 0700 and 1200 h on three days and use the data in the simulation model. In one simulation the team examined the effect of reducing the available technologists from the usual three on the processing delay (min) of both routine and STAT samples expressed as mean +/− SD (see table below). Signed rank tests showed all delays to be significantly different from each other at P < 0.004 or less. These data can provide useful managerial information for levels of staffing at differing workloads.
The Effect of Reducing Available Technologists
Seoul Hospital Integrates LIS and Automation to Dramatically Reduce Turnaround Time
Jong-Won Kim and his associates at Samsung Medical Center, Seoul, Korea, have developed a laboratory information system (LIS) and an automation system integrated with the hospital information system.
Samsung Medical Center is a non-profit and 100 bed-size general hospital, utilizing an Oracle relational database program and a UNIX operating system. Physicians request tests through MS-Windows and produce barcode labels. An automatic carrier system transfers a withdrawn sample to the laboratory and the automatic sample processing system houses the autoanalyzers.
They have interfaced 28 autoanalyzers with the host computer. Autoanalyzers read the barcode labels, receive the information from the host computer and do the tests. The test results are immediately sent to the host computer and the delta and panic checks are done. Verified results can be immediately retrieved through the ward computers by the physicians. The automation team measured the time from the sample withdrawal to the laboratory reception; the average time was 30 minutes.
The turnaround time (TAT) from the sample reception to the result verification was measured, previously represented by the test result report for two weeks. For the clinical chemistry tests, the sample number was 5301 during 11 working days and the average TAT was 161.1 minutes. For the routine CBC tests that average TAT measured 115 minutes and for stat chemistry tests, 17.40 minutes. A new TAT index was created as a TAT map, a three-dimensional graph, with the x-axis as turnaround time, y-axis as sample number, and z-axis as sample reception time. It monitors the TAT distributions and helps to identify and solve the causes of delaying the TAT. Turnaround time could decrease dramatically by incorporation LIS and laboratory automation.
Source: Jong-Won Kim, Dae Won Kim, Department of Clinical Pathology, Samsung Medical Center, Seoul 135-230, Korea
3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals Receives Broad New Patent Covering the Use of Computers and Robots to Generate Drug Leads
3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (3DP) announced a broad new patent (U.S. Patent #5,463,564) that covers the automatic generation of new drug leads through computer-controlled, iterative robotic synthesis and analysis of chemical libraries — a technology the company has named Directed Diversity. ‘We believe that 3DP's Directed Diversity technology has the potential to have a profound effect on the future of drug discovery’ said F. Raymond Salemme, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer. ‘It controls the process of discovering chemical compounds in much the way that a computer's operating system controls the computer. It is capable of producing important new pharmaceuticals more efficiently and at far less cost than has previously been possible. This patent will have special and immediate relevance to the field of combinatorial chemistry’. The 3DP patent application was granted ‘Special Status’, meriting accelerated review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
‘Traditional Drug Discovery Methods Have Not Kept Pace’
The recent surge of human gene discoveries has produced a dramatic increase in new molecular targets known to play a significant role in causing disease. Traditional drug discovery methods, dependent on synthesis and testing of compounds one by one, have proved incapable of keeping up with the demand for new compounds to test against all the newly discovered targets. ‘The limitations of conventional pharmaceutical research are a fundamental reason for the high cost and slow pace of drug discovery’, noted Dr. Salemme. ‘We believe Directed Diversity will enable us to bring new therapies to patients who need them more rapidly than ever before’.
‘Harnessing the Potential of Combinatorial Chemistry’
‘In just the last couple of years, the pharmaceutical industry has adopted combinatorial chemistry as a way to multiply the number of new drug leads’, Dr. Salemme said. Combinatorial chemistry can produce hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of molecules by chemically combining and recombining basic molecular building blocks in different configurations. The challenge is how to identify, out of these huge numbers of molecules, those which have the potential to become important new pharmaceuticals.
‘Unlike other combinatorial approaches which tend to generate libraries of compounds at random, Directed Diversity is an iterative optimization process that explores combinatorial space through successive rounds of selection, synthesis and testing’, said Dr. Salemme. ‘Our process captures and uses vast amounts of information to develop libraries of novel, small molecule drugs by selectively combining a particular set of chemical building blocks. Directed Diversity is an operating system that is capable of harnessing the potential of combinatorial chemistry’.
Directed Diversity Retains and Learns from the Information It Generates
Directed Diversity is a computer-aided, iterative process for generating chemical compounds with a prescribed set of physical, chemical and/or biological properties. During each iteration, a chemical library is robotically generated, and the structure and activity of individual molecules in the library are analyzed to determine how closely they match the desired set of properties. A database records all observed structural data, measured activity and computed properties for each compound analyzed in the form of structure-activity models.
Using the information ‘learned’ from these structure-activity models, the Directed Diversity process begins the next iteration by formulating new instructions to control synthesis of the next generation of compounds. In each succeeding iteration, existing structure-activity models are refined and new models are constructed — automatically applying the information gained in previous iterations. This process continues until the desired new drug leads have been identified. The Directed Diversity technology was developed exclusively by a team of 3DP scientists. The inventors named in the patent are Dimitris K. Agrafiotis, Ph.D.; Roger F. Bone, Ph.D.; F. Raymond Salemme, Ph.D.; and Richard M. Soil, Ph.D. The patent covers the use of semi-automated and automated feedback control for generating combinatorial libraries and refining their properties — and extends to applications where suitable properties can be measured, including drugs, herbicides, paints, scents, solvents, advanced materials, etc. 3DP intends to license Directed Diversity technology to a select number of major pharmaceutical companies — and 3DP scientists are already using it to discover and refine drugs active against a wide range of targets such as receptors and enzymes known to be implicated in cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease and cancer. 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was founded in 1993 to integrate advanced technologies in structure-based drug design, combinatorial chemistry and chemi-informatics or the cost-effective discovery of orally active pharmaceuticals. Directed Diversity United States Patent No. 5,463,564