Recent Advances in High-Throughput Automated Powder Dispensing Platforms for Pharmaceutical Applications

Abstract

A wide array of pharmaceutical research studies involve dispensing a variety of powders such as active ingredients, intermediates, catalysts, and formulation excipients. Automated powder dispensing platforms are increasingly relied upon to perform the mundane task of filling vials in multi-well plates for high-throughput experimentation workflows. A small group of pharmaceutical scientists collaborated to evaluate recent advances in commercially available automation platforms from two instrument manufacturers using previously reported objective and systematic testing protocols. This manuscript details the testing conditions used for the evaluation and the results obtained and assesses the impact that the powder characteristics had on the performance of the selected platforms through statistical analysis.

Automation isn't automatic

“…Hopper/ feeder modules are best suited for milligram to gram quantity solid dispensing. 14,15 In addition, hopper/ feeder modules are best suited to dispense free-flowing solids, as interruptions in solid flow may lead to a device timeout.…”

“…The SWILE in particular has been shown to be highly effective in sub-milligram to lowmilligram dispense quantities. 14,15 Positive displacement modules are effective in the automated dispensing of a wider range of solids with varying physical properties, including sticky or oily solids.…”

Navigating through the Maze of Homogeneous Catalyst Design with Machine Learning

“…Since the rise of combinatorial chemistry [72], HTE has become a standard tool of reaction development [73]. However, throughput can be increased further by automating the reaction setup via liquid [73] and solid [74] dispensing and miniaturization. In that regard, inspiration can be taken from the tremendous progress in biochemistry that enabled directed evolution [75] by relying on microfluidics [76] like droplet sorting techniques (Figure 3) [77].…”

Advancement in Organic Synthesis Through High Throughput Experimentation

“…Further advances in solid handling were validated by Bahr and coworkers [20] using the automated commercial powder dispensing platforms provided by Chemspeed and Mettler Toledo. Six different powders were dispensed over 3240 times across three different platforms and a comparison of accuracy, analysis of variance, error distribution and dispense time for dispensing solid ranging from 0.1 mg to 50 mg doses was performed.…”