Eli Lilly and company (LLY.NYSE) and robotic cloud-computing provider, Strateos, unveiled the Lilly Life Sciences Studio lab, a new robotic laboratory in San Diego, Calfornia, designed to accelerate the drug discovery process today.
The lab came about as part of a $90 million investment made in 2017 to expand Lilly’s research footprint in San Diego, and it includes giving Strateos the ability to offer access to other drug companies and research scientists through its cloud-based platform as part of the collaboration.
“Lilly is committed to finding new ways to accelerate the drug discovery process and this collaboration with Strateos further enables this mission. Through the studio lab, emerging drug discovery companies can gain access to a variety of tools and throughput usually reserved for much larger organizations. Lilly and Strateos are excited to expand access of this technology to others in the scientific community,” said Bill Health, senior vice president of Lilly’s Molecule Innovation Hub.
A robotic cloud lab is a deeply integrated technology stack of biology, robotics and software made available to its users via the internet. Unlike traditional, in-house lab-automation, a robotic cloud lab flexibly supports multiple assay types and is built from the ground up to be controlled remotely, even from the other side of the planet.
The 11,500 square foot lab integrates several areas of the discovery process, including design and synthesis, purification and analysis, and sample management and hypothesis testing into a fully automated platform. The lab will be operated on the Strateos technology platform allowing research scientists to remotely control their experiments using a web-based interface. The new integrated system lets scientists run and refine experiments in real-time with a high degree of reproducibility.
What is Strateos?
Formerly known as Transcriptic and 3Scan, Strateos provides on-demand discovery science. They automate medicinal chemistry, biological analyses and synthetic biology into closed-loop robot labs that accelerate medicinal research programs around the world. They accomplish this feat by utilizing a combination of robotics and control systems, and advanced software for analytics. The cloud lab platform allows for scale, efficiency and accuracy for the drug discovery process.
“Lilly and Strateos have long histories of leadership in lab automation and we are pleased to combine our collective expertise to expanded access to this facility via the Strateos Robotic Cloud Lab platform. This laboratory represents the next evolution in drug discovery as we close the loop of synthesis and testing. Through this collaboration, we are building on our current on-demand biology capabilities and integrating automated chemical synthesis to enable a complete, rapid design-make-test-analyze cycle. This partnership furthers our mission to combine innovation, integration, and industrialization to drive information essential to accelerating discovery,” said Mark Fischer-Colbrie, CEO at Strateos.
The studio lab currently includes more than 100 instruments and storage for over 5 million compounds, all within a closed-loop and automated drug discovery platform. Drug discovery teams will be able to synthesize, test, and optimize compounds remotely for lead generation in biological and medicinal chemistry experiments in a closed-loop and integrated manner via the platform.
—Joseph Morton