BioCity-based firm invests £1.3m in new tech

A Nottingham-based drug discovery company has invested £ 1.3 million in a new high-throughput screening (HTS) system at its BioCity base.

Sygnature Discovery has added the in-house HTS system to its range of drug discovery services.

HTS allows thousands of molecules to be tested for activity in a short period of time, providing a quick way of identifying starting points for drug discovery programmes.

The new system combines Titian Mosaic sample management technology with an automation platform designed by HiRes Biosolutions, while data analysis is facilitated using Genedata software – the first time these three leading vendors have worked together on the same system.

Colin Sambrook Smith, Sygnature’s director of computational sciences and informatics, said: “We decided to build our own HTS capability after feedback from our clients, especially around compound quality in many historical screening libraries.

“Having the capability housed within our Nottingham labs, where it can be integrated with our other hit-finding functions, will bring an enormous amount of additional value to our clients and their drug discovery projects.”