Lab automation and robotics – accelerating the pace of antimicrobial therapy

Antibiotics are the life-saving drugs used to treat and manage microbial infections. Antibiotic resistance occurs when microbes keeps changing their responses to use of these drugs. The acceleration of antibiotic resistance is mainly due to the excessive use or misuse of antibiotics in humans and animals. In recent years, antibiotic resistance has become one of the biggest global public health threats that affects countless of human lives irrespective of age, sex, time and country. New antibiotic resistance mechanisms are evolving continuously and spreading globally, threatening our abilities to chase new drugs against infectious diseases. A growing number of microbial infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, blood poisoning (bacteremia) and food borne diseases are sometimes difficult to treat as the existing antibiotics becomes less effective. Patients with infections caused by drug-resistant microbes are at greater risk of poor clinical outcomes and consume more healthcare, which ultimately leads to increased mortality and elevated medical costs associated with use of expensive antibiotics and prolonged medical stay in the hospitals. The rapid emergence of antibiotic resistance is placing the achievement of modern medicine at risk and urged scientific community worldwide to rapidly replace drugs that are now ineffective to combat these deadly pathogens on a fast track.

In the light of global emergence of antibiotic resistance throughout the world, discovery of newer drugs that could potentiate the effects of conventional antibiotics remains an important aspect of antimicrobial research in the 21st century. The major bottleneck in antimicrobial drug discovery occurs at the lab bench where new drug candidate must be tested at multiple concentrations against multiple strains in different combinations. This remains to be an inefficient process as it consumes more time and require labor-intensive steps that researchers must need to perform by hand manually. This process could be vastly speed up by lab automation systems. Lab automation has now become one of the most power tools for drug discovery and it offers versatile platform for rapid high-throughput screening and testing of antimicrobial drugs with minimal human intervention at much affordable price. The breadth of applications of automated systems have accelerated the drug discovery process and bears promise in making better decision faster to tackle antibiotic resistance. Automated systems also provide indistinguishable results compared to those obtained by research personnel’s performing the same experiments by hand. More interestingly, robots took very less time (1/3rd) to complete the experiments than as the human do and liberating pharmaceutical scientists from incredibly frustrating tasks. Recent advances in the laboratory workflow using automated systems also brings in new hopes to the pharmaceutical scientist to rapidly identify and characterize potent antibiotics that could save countless of human lives and reduce the economic burden of the society.

Currently, laboratory automation and information technologies are driving a new era of pharmaceutical research with spectacular improvement in optimizing the choice of antibiotics and therapies to patients in a timely manner. The pace of diagnostic procedures in clinical laboratories has largely been unchanged for many years, as the availability of diagnostic results mainly depended on the growth of microorganisms. Rapid microbial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) play a critical role in patient health care and prevention of antibiotic resistance mechanisms. Conventional approaches of microbial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing relied on culture-based methods that takes long turnaround time leadings to increased spread of infectious diseases, misuse of antibiotics and elevated mortality rate5. Recent advances in automation provide promising platform for rapid microbial identification and antibiotic susceptibility profiling that would potentially reduce the burden of infectious diseases.

My recent article in Drug Target Review aims to describe some of the high throughput laboratory automation technologies such as high content screening (HCS) system, microfluidic-antibiotic susceptibility testing, digital imaging of cells, automated multiplex PCR, cellphone based microplate reader and liquid handling robot that could be implemented robustly in pharmaceutical research for pathogen identification and development of potent antimicrobial drugs to tackle antibiotic resistance.

Read More at

https://www.drugtargetreview.com/article/30467/lab-automation-in-depth-focus-2018/