HEIDELBERG--LION Bioscience, a bioinformatics company here, announced that, in partnership with the Automation Partnership, it will automate membrane filter processing and DNA hybridization, key steps in genome mapping. LION said its success in the area of microbial genomics research has led to the need to increase its capacity and add a further accelerated genome mapping process in the midterm future.
Automation Partnership is a UK-based provider of advanced automated tools for life sciences research, from drug discovery and genomics processing to production and packaging. LION's collaboration covers a multiphase project in which the partners will first develop new techniques to make the complex steps of the research easier to automate. Later phases will see the design and implementation of enhanced automated systems at LION to meet the demands of its life sciences customers.
Patrik Scholler, LION's vice-president of technologies, remarked that "manual processing methods are failing to keep pace with industry's need for reproducible quality, large scale, and higher throughput."
"Automation will match and exceed the manual methods, speeding up the gene and drug discovery cycle and therefore the time to market for new products," he concluded.