Fully Automated Chemistry System for Salt and Polymorph Screening

TTP LabTech recently announced that it has successfully completed a major laboratory automation project with AstraZeneca. The project, which took over three years to complete, involved the design and build of a fully automated system for salt and polymorph screening of novel compounds. The system completed its site acceptance test (SAT) late last year before coming on-line at AstraZeneca’s research facility in Södertälje. This unique system for synthesising and analysing crystalline materials was designed in partnership between AstraZeneca and TTP LabTech. The overall objectives were to increase throughput, to explore experimental space efficiently and reliably and to automate the analysis of huge amounts of data. The project has been undertaken in stages, the first of which was a prototyping stage. This stage helped to minimise risk by tackling those design elements that carried the greatest number of unknowns early in the project. The next stage was the full design and build of a single screening machine to demonstrate control, functionality, and consistency of the basic automated polymorph screening processes. Now TTP LabTech has been asked to replicate the entire system in order to double the overall throughput.

Dr Philip Blenkinsop, MD TTP LabTech, commented: “This has been a very challenging project for TTP LabTech requiring a number of novel solutions to be developed from both a hardware and software perspective. The completion of the first system is a real milestone and we look forward to delivering the next system with the next year.” The AstraZeneca Project Manager, Matti Ahlqvist, commented: “Working in partnership with TTP LabTech has resulted in an excellent solution. We set a very demanding specification and are delighted that virtually all the functionality has been achieved. Now that the first system is up and running for our drug projects, we look forward to delivery of the second system and further increasing throughput.”