Pharmaceutical assay development groups work under constant time pressure to produce robust assays that can be transferred into high-throughput screening (HTS) workflows. Facing ever more modalities and complexity without a commensurate increase in resources, many groups are harnessing the power of Design of Experiments (DoE) to shorten their development cycles.

In DoE, process conditions (factors) are simultaneously varied in a statistically optimised way to allow analysis of how different factors interact, which cannot be observed in one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) experiments. Manually execution of conventional DoE campaigns still requires weeks of iterative cycles, as the number of runs possible per cycle is limited by the need to reduce calculation, liquid handling and data manipulation steps in order to minimise human error.

Here, we combine the speed and accuracy of TTP Labtech’s dragonfly® discovery dispenser with the flexible planning and data aggregation capabilities of a web-based software (Antha) that we have developed to unlock the possibility of physically executing a 6-factor space-filling DoE to comprehensively characterise a spectrophotometric enzymatic assay in a single work day.