Selective In-Plate Purification

▸The challenge

Early drug discovery now makes compounds far faster than it can clean them up. Automated high-throughput synthesis turns out plate after plate of reaction mixtures, but purification has not kept pace: HPLC-based routes are slow, costly, and awkward to fit into plate-based robotic workflows, so clean-up has become the step that sets the pace of the whole design–make–test cycle. The alternative — pushing crude mixtures straight into biological screening — trades that delay for noisier assay data.

Take the purification bottleneck out of high-throughput discovery — without a new instrument, and without leaving the plate.

▸The technology

A method developed at BME for turning standard, commercially available SBS filter microplates into selective clean-up devices, so that excess starting material is removed from reaction mixtures in the plate itself.

• ▸No new instrument, no capital outlay — built on catalogue consumables, not custom hardware.
• ▸Drops into existing automation — standard SBS format, so it fits essentially any liquid-handling robot already in the lab.
• ▸Plate to plate — no intermediate handling, no dilution, minimal sample loss.
• ▸Frugal — low solvent, reagent, and energy consumption.
• ▸Selective, not generic — clean-up targeted at specific classes of starting material, rather than the broad-brush separation of generic SPE or filtration plates.
• ▸Cleaner input for Direct-to-Biology — better-behaved samples for downstream screening.

▸Where it applies

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, CROs, and automated medicinal-chemistry groups running robotic high-throughput synthesis and screening — and the laboratory-consumables manufacturers who supply them. The value is highest wherever purification throughput, rather than synthesis throughput, is what limits the discovery cycle.

▸The intellectual property

• ▸Developed at BME, which holds the work outright.
• ▸The durable asset is the manufacturing know-how for producing these plates reproducibly and at scale — the part a manufacturer would license.
• ▸Early stage (TRL 2). A funded 12-month proof-of-concept programme is under way, validating the approach on reaction mixtures from industrial robotic synthesis, with TRL 4 as the target at close.
• ▸Technical detail is shared with qualified parties under a confidentiality agreement.

Note — this is early-stage work. The properties described above are the approach's design intent, not measured results; generating that data is what the current proof-of-concept programme is for.

▸Licensing

BME's preferred route is to license the platform — together with the associated manufacturing know-how — to a laboratory-consumables manufacturer with existing production, quality systems, and distribution, rather than to make plates itself. BME is also interested in hearing from discovery groups willing to supply real high-throughput reaction mixtures for validation during the proof-of-concept phase.