PharmaIQ Live: SmartLab Digital 2022 - Event Recap

Strateos had the pleasure of participating at the PharmaIQ Live: Smartlab Digital 2022 conference held between March 8-9th, which focused on the potential of Lab 4.0 strategies to increase the speed, efficiency and reduce the cost of the drug discovery process.

John Harman, Sr. Director of Product Management at Strateos, with over 30 years of small molecule drug discovery experience, gave a talk where he outlined key industry pain points and how cloud labs can provide solutions by increasing connectivity and enhancing the design-make-test-analyze (DMTA) to increase both the speed and data quality to accelerate drug discovery.

“Conventional methods using outsourcing models haven't solved the fundamental productivity challenges that we face in R&D. The outcomes are not showing an increase in efficiency or speed at which we are operating...that is what we are looking to address.” John Harman, Sr. Director of Product Management, Strateos.

Early-stage drug discovery is highly complex and iterative, which bottlenecks the overall workflow. Many iterations of the design-make-test-analyze (DMTA) cycle that involve numerous stakeholders and critical decision points makes it a challenging area to optimize.  The goal at Strateos is to accelerate drug discovery pipelines by focusing on overcoming slow DMTA cycle times to achieve higher quality outcomes, and shorten idea-to-date timelines with the SmartLab automated cloud laboratories.

The Three Pillars of the Strateos Cloud Lab Automation-as-a-Service Platform

Strateos’ cloud laboratories comprise two physical locations, which house an amalgamation of automated medicinal chemistry, small molecule, and large molecule  experimental modules connected and operated by the Strateos Lab Automation Software to enable closed loop DMTA testing. The software was designed to operate in an agnostic manner making it a portable and extendable solution for implementation in other organizations. The three pillars of the Strateos platform include:

• Control Our Lab – access and control Strateos’ cloud laboratories to design, manage, execute experiments, and retrieve data all through a web interface
• Control Your Lab – implement the Strateos Lab Automation Software to control and connect in-house instruments and workcells
• Build Your Lab – build infrastructure and workflow solutions using Strateos’ platform when updating or creating new automated facility designs for your organization

Compound Analog Screening Idea-to-Data Case Study

John closed his talk with a compound analog screening case study, which successfully demonstrated end-to-end idea-to-data capabilities and compressed cycle times using the Strateos Cloud Lab Automated Platform. To design, make and test 14 structural analog structures, along with the core structure tofacitinib took ~40 active hours over 4 days compared to a normal, fractured workflow, which would take on average 2-4 weeks to execute. This closed loop testing significantly compressed the DMTA cycles needed to achieve the end goals. The rapid generation of model-quality data also provides the opportunity to optimize downstream machine learning algorithms in real time for AI enablement to support hypothesis validation to truly maximize the value of accelerated closed-loop DMTA testing for early-stage drug discovery.

“Strateos is pioneering new ways to help the industry do better.” John Harman, Sr. Product Manager, Strateos.

To watch John’s presentation in full, please click the video below: