ABSTRACT
As one of the first steps in the drug discovery process, high-throughput screening (HTS) has become a key tool in the discovery of pharmacological leads. Robotics and automation are now absolutely essential to perform the tremendous number of tests that a company conducts each year to discover new drugs in every step in the drug discovery process from lead optimization to clinical trials. Before robotics and automation were widely used in screening laboratories, it was customary for a researcher or laboratory technician to take one full year to test only a few hundred compounds [1]. Now, with robotics and other laboratory automation, it is possible to screen 100,000 or more compounds in a 24-hour period.
