AstraZeneca Invests in Technology for New Cambridge Drug Discovery Centre
AstraZeneca is expanding its technology investments with a new drug discovery centre in Cambridge. The company is forming new partnerships to advance the identification of novel medicines.
Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is increasing its investment in technology with the establishment of a new drug discovery centre at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The facility aims to accelerate the identification of novel small molecule medicines through enhanced screening and compound management technologies.
The company has entered into three significant partnerships to ensure access to state-of-the-art technologies. One collaboration is with HighRes Biosolutions to develop advanced robotics systems, utilizing technology originally created for the European Space Agency. These robots are designed for more efficient and flexible high-throughput screening of compounds.
Additionally, AstraZeneca is partnering with Labcyte and Brooks Automation to implement liquid handling technology based on acoustic waves. This novel approach allows for the dispensing of compounds directly from storage tubes into test plates without pipetting, reducing compound usage and improving the quality of screening data.
A third partnership with Genedata will see AstraZeneca adopt an advanced software platform to expedite data sharing and analysis with collaborators. The objective is to streamline the drug discovery process and reduce associated costs.
The centre is set to screen approximately two million chemical structures per target to identify new compounds for disease targets. This investment aims to enhance AstraZeneca's capability to discover future medicines.