Tecan and HP Team Up to Reinvent Drug Titration

Tecan and HP have teamed up to reinvent the drug titration process for small molecules. Titration is an everyday necessity for drug discovery biologists, yet there is a surprising amount of diversity in how titrations are performed. Until now, researchers have had to make compromises, balancing quality of data with productivity, throughput and cost. Each laboratory makes different trade-offs, and so performs titration in surprisingly different ways.
The companies provide a benchtop solution which eliminates the traditional serial dilution process. Available exclusively through Tecan's Life Science Business, the HP D300 Digital Dispenser is a simple, standalone instrument designed to simplify drug titration studies for small molecules in DMSO. It uses HP's Direct Digital Dispensing technology to offer rapid non­contact dispensing from 13 pl to 10 ?l, delivering any dose to any well and allowing dose­response curves to be created directly from stock compound solutions. This not only removes the need for laborious, time-consuming and wasteful serial dilutions - allowing researchers to go from concept to experiment to results much faster - it also gives access to experiments that were previously impractical.
Picoliter dispensing can be a challenge in itself due to the increasing surface-to­-volume ratio and evaporation risks. HP's technology has now been applied to the drug discovery process, bringing speed, reproducibility and standardization to the titration workflow. The D300 combines reliable performance with ready-to-run convenience. Single use T8 dispenseheads virtually eliminate the risk of cross­contamination, offering researchers a simple way of streamlining drug discovery workflows without compromising on data quality. The system's intuitive software has been designed specifically for drug discovery applications, incorporating time- and labor-saving features - such as randomizing compound doses across the plate to minimize the potential impact of edge effects - which further accelerate the time to results.
Digital titration is also enabling new science that was previously impractical. Experiments that may have been dismissed due to their complexity or time-consuming nature - such as drug-drug interaction studies - can now be performed with ease, thanks to the system's non-contact dispensing and independent dosing of each compound. Scientists also have the option to further reduce standard error for IC50 determinations, by using finely spaced dosing regimens to see the true shape of the dose response curve.