Research scientists at Nicholas Piramal India Ltd, a pharmaceutical company based in Mumbai, India, are automating a variety of biochemical and cell-based drug discovery assays with a Tecan Freedom EVO® 200 liquid handling workstation. This is one of the first fully functional, integrated screening facilities in India and the assays are designed to identify new lead compounds for the treatment of cancers, metabolic diseases and inflammatory disorders.

The Freedom EVO workstation is controlled by Tecan’s Freedom EVOware® Plus software, which combines pipetting and scheduling for simultaneous testing of hundreds of compounds in triplicate. Dr Asha Almeida, group leader at the Nicholas Piramal Research Center, explained: “Being able to automate all the assays using a variety of different cell lines with a single platform was critical in deciding which robot to choose. Our current throughput is 10,000 data points per week and, in two months, we can complete a workload that would take an entire year to perform manually.”

“Automating our assays using the Freedom EVO system has made life much easier and significantly reduced the hit to lead transformation time,” she continued. “In the near future, we will be able to double our data throughput by switching to a 384-well assay format.”

About Tecan

Tecan (www.tecan.com) is a leading global supplier of solutions for the biopharma, forensic and diagnostic industries. The company is a leader in the development, production and distribution of advanced automation and detection solutions for the world’s leading life science laboratories. Through its REMP subsidiary (www.remp.com), Tecan is the premier supplier of large-scale automated laboratory storage and logistics systems. Founded in Switzerland in 1980, the company has over 1100 employees, owns production, research and development sites in both North America and Europe and maintains a sales and service network in 52 countries. In 2006, Tecan achieved sales of CHF 405.9 million (USD 324.7 million; EUR 258.6 million). Shares of the Tecan Group are traded on the SWX Swiss Exchange (TK: TECN/Reuters: TECZn.S/Valor: 1210019).

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