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P3009
Increasing Efficiency & Maintaining Quality  Running HTS on a 24/7 Schedule.
Presenter Lynda Cook, Bristol-Myers Squibb, USA
Additional Authors: Jennifer Zewinski, Jessica DeVito, Jessica Dodge, Kim Esposito, Ramesh Padmanabha
Automated systems and miniaturized formats have greatly improved throughput in screening with >50,000 compounds per day being almost routine. However, there is still room for increasing the efficiency of the process. Robot set up time is often a bottle neck as is the ramp up time before the system reaches a steady state of throughput. Robot set up involves plate loading and unloading, liquid dispenser set up and clean up, plate reader initialization etc. One way to reduce this down time is to enable continuous operation of the system, with fresh reagents and plates being added on the fly. We describe here a process whereby a full deck HTS was run over a period of nine days in a continuous manner with an average throughput of over 150,000 compounds/day. This poster describes the scheduling of the runs within the robotic software, the logistic challenges in keeping the robot running, and the results of the screen, including all of the quality control measures that were taken to ensure that the biology was not compromised.