New life sciences institute wants to make drug discovery 10 times more efficient
The UK’s £103 million Rosalind Franklin Institute will unite robotics, chemistry and biophysics to generate drug candidates within weeks
Drug discovery will receive a £103 million boost at the UK’s new national life science institute the Rosalind Franklin Institute. Robotics, synthesis and biophysics will be brought together in a high-throughput facility that aims to make drug discovery up to 10 times more productive. A fully automated workflow will make drugs for clinical testing within weeks rather than months.
‘The way we do drug discovery currently is based around a design–make–purify test cycle,’ explains synthetic chemist Adam Nelson from the University of Leeds, who will be leading the Rosalind Franklin Institute’s chemistry for medicine programme. Although medicinal chemistry already uses automated processes, they tend to focus on individual stages in this cycle. ‘We want to increase the throughput of each stage and integrate them better.’