System Architectures Enabling Reconfigurable Laboratory-Automation Systems

As many biopharma companies fill their drug-discovery pipeline with new blockbuster candidates every year, the integration techniques employed become more critical. In the biopharma industry, high throughput screening (HTS) is an essential function to deliver new drugs rapidly and cost effectively. This interdisciplinary function requires not only understanding of the biology and biochemistry underlying the therapeutic target but involves engineering functions, such as automation, robotics, detection technologies, high-volume data acquisition, and analysis as well. This paper discusses a six-year long research and development (R&D) effort in pursuit of developing system architectures that makes HTS systems more flexible and reconfigurable. From the capital-intensive pharmaceutical laboratories to booming biotech startups driven by advances in human genomics, changing architectural paradigms in screening automation are reviewed. Recently, flexibility and reconfigurability of systems to achieve maximum utilization has emerged as the dominant requirement from a systems perspective as reuse of expensive instruments and equipment is an essential component of cost-effectiveness in drug discovery. In order to enable reconfigurability of systems, we present our modular and object-oriented control-system framework and software-design patterns adopted into our control architecture. Embodiment of these patterns in our control architecture added value to functions of various stakeholders of products from R&D engineers, marketing/sales, to field service and users. Further, we discuss the requirements, design, and implementation of these unique patterns, which effectively balances reusability, flexibility, ease of use, and throughput in integrated-system platforms that we have developed. The techniques and models that are presented in this paper will improve architectural flexibility of HTS systems, thereby helping automation experts, scientists, chemists, and other levels of users in the field to make the most out of their systems.