Collaborative approaches are central to SPT Labtech’s work of automating and miniaturizing complex life science workflows, according to CEO Rob Walton. “One of the key principles of our businesses is working with customers on a very individualized basis” and on specific applications “to be able to solve the problem and get the outcomes that they need,” he told GEN in an interview. In most cases, “the customers are very clear on what they want to achieve, but they don’t necessarily know how to get the automation … to get the outcomes that they want.”
And that’s where SPT Labtech automation expertise comes in. “We’ve been the pioneers of positive displacement technology for almost 20 years” starting with “our first mosquito system … and that’s kind of evolved throughout the portfolio with the development of the dragonfly system, also our larger firefly system,” he said. It allows “us to [provide a] very high precision, low volume, liquid dispensing capability.”
That expertise is at the heart of a new collaboration between SPT Labtech and BellBrook Labs that was announced last week during the annual meeting of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS). The partners developed a miniaturized, high-throughput cell-based assay for drug discovery in oncology. Specifically, the assay is designed for discovering and profiling VPS4B (vacuolar protein sorting associated protein 4B) ATPase inhibitors. VPS4B is considered an important therapeutic target due to its overexpression in specific tumors and its synthetic-lethal relationship with its paralog, VPS4A.
The miniaturized platform combines BellBrook Labs’ Transcreener® ADP2 fluorescence polarization assay with SPT Labtech’s dragonfly® system. The Transcreener assay supports direct, homogeneous detection of adenosine diphosphate, while dragonfly supports automated reagent dispensing. The combined solution, which operates in 384- and 1536-well formats, was “instrumental” in helping BellBrook labs successfully identify 13 novel VPS4B inhibitors. The partners shared data related to the identification of the inhibitors during the meeting.
Justin Brink, president of BellBrook Labs, described the assay as a “game-changer for any biotech or pharma team targeting” complex ATPases. “We have significantly lowered the barriers to VPS4B screening, allowing researchers to dramatically reduce reagent consumption while maintaining the high Z’ values and data sensitivity required for reliable hit identification.”
The current partnership is consistent with the kinds of applications that SPT Labtech has typically worked on, according to Walton. Several of its partnerships are in the genomic space and focus on things like DNA and RNA sequencing as well as library prep applications. For example, in January this year, SPT Labtech announced that validated automated workflows for Twist Bioscience’s next generation sequencing library preparation kits are available on its SPT’s firefly® liquid handling platform. Then last October, the company announced a partnership with 10x Genomics to provide automated workflows for single cell research.
Depending on the complexity of the application, automation projects like the one with BellBrook can take one to three months to complete, Walton said. Part of the challenge is that manual and automated processes have different requirements. For example, “when you start to automate, the volumes are very different [and] the amount of extra volume we need to be able to put into the wells or to be able to spread things out can make it more difficult to automate certain steps within protocols.”
Automation is only good when it can replicate the manual process with the same level of accuracy and quality of results. And that translation between “what the original protocol was and what the automated protocol needs to be” can “take a lot of very fine experimentation and development and testing” to ensure that “you get the same results from the process.” That’s where “a partner who can really adapt themselves to whatever the specific application is” becomes essential.
In addition to expanding its list of genomics partnerships, SPT Labtech has upgrades planned for its three core liquid handling platforms that are designed to provide greater “walkaway” capability and improve users’ experience with the platforms. During SLAS, the company released upgraded versions of their mosquito and dragonfly liquid handling platforms including functionality that increases the pipetting capability of the mosquito platform. “We’ve refreshed all of the industrial designs, so we brought [them] up to date and upgraded the user interfaces quite significantly and made them even more easy and simple to use.”
Walton also said that the company is expanding its production facilities and teams in key global markets including China and India. “Even in a very competitive market in China, we’ve got a unique capability that customers are really looking for,” Walton said, “we’ve actually been seeing quite a lot of demand.”
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