A fully automated and modular microfluidic screening device for accelerated identification and optimization of antibodies, cells and proteins with extension for peptide synthesis and NCE screening

With the handling of nearly any cell and assay type, flexible screening setups and full automation in one device, microfluidics has shifted again their limits towards daily applications of standard HTS which will be demonstrated during the presentation.

Efficient Robotics has developed a fully automated and modular microfluidic screening device for accelerated identification and optimization of antibodies, cells and proteins with extension for peptide synthesis and NCE screening. For the first time, one nano-droplet microfluidic screening device can screen antibodies, proteins and cell lines using the same device while allowing the researcher to expand screening into peptide synthesis/screening and NCE screening.
The microfluidic device allows the researcher to identify and optimize cells and biomolecules for antibody production and optimization, protein engineering, cell line development and many more applications such as directed evolution, metabolic engineering and metagenome screenings. The device displays the full functionality of a common robotic HTS system. Different cell types can be handled in the system ranges from bacterial to mammalian cells with very precise incubation times for each droplet from hours to days. In addition, it allows precise exponential cell growth with a capacity of 1 million droplets in the 100 nl droplet scale. Assays can be added and homogeneous assays for a variety of different fluorescent read outs can be carried out with various assay times for each droplet. After analysis of each droplet with high sensitivities, droplets with higher performance can be sorted out and processed further. Because of the serial processing of each droplet, the system is highly precise with CVs less than 3% for a complete processing of droplets from start to finish. The device is a flexible and modular system and can be applied to synthetic biology approaches which enables the researcher a large variety of different applications with a throughput of up to 10 million samples/day. Different cell cultivations, assays and screening setups will be presented in case studies to demonstrate the flexibility and fully automated processing of droplets in the microfluidic system.

The device can be expanded by simply exchanging the cell incubator unit by a peptide synthesis module and screen internally synthesized peptides instead of cells or biomolecules. This allows the researcher to easily transition into peptide screening of up to 100,000 peptides per day with a proprietary AI algorithm for peptide optimization by several synthesis rounds. The prototype development will be shown in the presentation and commercial launch will come soon. Another case here presented is the concept module for transfer small molecules from external libraries into the microfluidic device. This is of particular interest for NCE screening (new chemical entities) with the microfluidic device. Such a module would allow the transfer and screening of 250,000 to 1 million samples a day from common MTP-based compound libraries.