EVENT RECAP 20/15 Visioneers Webinar - Event Recap

Strateos had the pleasure of participating with Evariste Technologies in a webinar hosted by 20/15 Visioneers, about cloud lab automation-as-a-service being leveraged to accelerate cycle times for faster drug discovery.

20/15 Visioneers is invested in R&D, IT and informatics solutions to improve efficiencies, collaboration and harmonization driven by FAIR data principles, in silico initiatives and automated cloud labs. On May 24, 2022, 20/15 Visioneers hosted a webinar on the topic of implementing cloud lab automation featuring Strateos’ own John Harman, Senior Director of Product Management, and Nicholas Firth, CEO of Evariste Technologies.

Here, we will provide a brief recap of the webinar entitled How Evariste Technologies Leveraged Cloud Lab Automation-as-a-Service to Accelerate Cycle Times for Faster Drug Discovery.

John kicked off the discussion by outlining how conventional DMTA (Design, Make, Test & Analyze) cycles in drug discovery programs are plagued by manual workflows, inadequate scientist-to-scientist communication across labs, less-than-ideal data tracking, slow cycle times, and huge capital expense.

Strateos’ closed-loop cloud automation platform is digitally transforming workflows across many sectors in the life sciences space by overcoming these roadblocks to enable faster DMTA cycles.

John summarized an internal case study highlighting the end-to-end idea-to-data capabilities of the automated platform to accelerate DMTA cycles. Fifteen structural analogs of the small molecule drug tofacitinib were successfully designed, synthesized, purified, and tested for functionality. The project was successfully completed in just 4 days (~40 active hours) compared to standard, manual workflows, which would have taken between 2-4 weeks. The designs were human-driven in this case, but this is where an AI or machine learning drug design process can be implemented to further enhance iterative design/testing cycles. This led into Nicholas’ presentation on how Evariste Technologies has integrated Strateos’ platform into their operations, specifically in the Design and Analysis phases, to produce candidate molecules faster than traditional drug discovery cycles.

Nicholas started off with a primer on Evariste Technologies. Their goal as a  Quant Biotech company is to increase productivity in drug discovery with their software platform, driven by AI/ML, automated molecular design, modeling solutions, and Bayesian statistics. Computational modeling can be applied to virtually screen billions of compounds to narrow down the potential chemical space. The compounds are scored, and a subset of molecules designed by the software can be sent to Strateos to be synthesized and screened for hit ID. This in silico approach can reduce time and increase the probability of successfully identifying clinical drug candidates.

Currently, they have seven active drug discovery projects with one full-time medicinal chemist. The benefit of having partners like Strateos is it allows the chemist to work on multiple projects simultaneously. The chemist can leverage the cloud infrastructure to conduct experiments, validate models, and reduce workload with quick turnaround times and reproducibility.

“I strongly believe that continuing to integrate with the Strateos platform is going to give us increased operational leverage to execute more drug discovery projects and diversify into new areas” Nicholas Firth, CEO, Evariste Technologies.

To view the webinar in full, please visit the link: https://strateos.com/watch-our-cloud-lab-automation-webinar-on-demand/