The ability to work out the crystal structures of proteins is a critical step in the development of new drugs that interact with them. To date, this crystallisation process has been a bottleneck in drug discovery, but Veeco maintains that its new system provides the right combination of automation and a hike in accuracy by removing the subjectivity of manual inspection.
The Oasis 1750 was first introduced in the US in March and is Veeco's first entry into the drug discovery marketplace. Until recently, the company has focused on developing instruments in the semiconductor, data storage and telecommunications markets, but latterly a downturn in these sectors has prompted it to look in new directions, including towards the life sciences.
The benchtop system sets out to automate what is currently a very labour-intensive process that is slow, fatiguing and prone to operator error. It includes some novel optical technologies, including a laser-based high-speed autofocus system that helps the imager cope with the effects that tiny differences in the dimensions of a well on a plate can have on resolution.
Another is a proprietary strobe-light system that illuminates the bottom of each well in the plate as the imager scans across it, reducing the risk of false-negatives when crystal form in the shadowy 'occlusion zones' at the edges of the droplets in the wells.
These technologies allow the system to scan 8,000 well plates an hour, while integrated software records if crystalline protein precipitates are present and scores the plates accordingly.
A spokesman for the firm said that the system has a throughput that is 20 times faster than can be achieved with manual inspection, and three to eight times as fast as rival automated systems.
Other companies with product offerings in the high-throughput protein crystal imaging sector include DataCentric Automation with its Rhombix Vision product line, Diversified Scientific's CrystalScore, RoboDesign International's CrystalMation and Fluidigm's Topaz AutoInspeX.