Sidebar: Selected Suppliers of Liquid-Handling Equipment
Both the Human Genome Project and combinatorial chemistry experiments will be sending many new chemical compounds into the drug discovery and development pipeline. These compounds include genes, antisense oligonucleotides, and peptides. "The number of compounds that will be tested for potential activity in understanding a disease state or providing a diagnostic or therapeutic tool will continue to increase at a massive rate," predicts Charles Powell, group leader in robotics/DNA at Beckman Instruments Inc. in Fullerton, Calif. "There will be a great need to handle a larger number of compounds dissolved in liquids and a diversity of assays to adequately measure them."
Pharmaceutical firms are gearing up to accelerate screening of chemical compounds for potential drug activity, such as enzyme inhibition or receptor binding. James Fergus, a senior associate scientist at Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert Corp. in Ann Arbor, Mich., works in a high-throughput drug-screening laboratory. "Our liquid-handling ...
