The company is looking to put its 10 years of custom automation project experience to the test by inviting companies to present them with a difficult automation problem for them to solve.
With pharmaceutical companies under ever-increasing pressure to maximise the efficiency of their research efforts, automation is playing a bigger and bigger role in their efforts to streamline the drug discovery, quality control (QC) and formulation processes.
"Automation allows the researchers to focus on the science and the analysis of data rather than the manual labour," said Lars Lind-Hansen, sales manager at Astech Projects.
According to Lind-Hansen most automation systems only automate a single part of the process, leaving the laboratory with bottlenecks.
Astech look to automate an entire process from start to finish to avoid these bottlenecks appearing and will often look to integrate various 'off-the-shelf' solutions with each other.
If a company buys a high-throughput HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) system, sample preparation bottlenecks often arise said Lind-Hansen.
To combat this, Astech look to integrate liquid and powder handlers with the HPLC system to allow the researchers to focus on the things they were trained to do.
The company has extended this approach to include heating an mixing steps to automate entire reaction and analysis processes.
The majority of Astech's customers have been the large pharmaceutical companies that have large research projects and try to screen thousands of compounds a year.
The company has had considerable success in automating systems to help develop and QC inhalation devices.
"The automation gives increased consistency of results compared to a human repeating the same action hundreds of times a day, moreover such a system removes a possible repetitive strain injury issue," said Lind-Hansen.
Automation can also help reduce health and safety issues for laboratory workers as human errors can be minimised and the results of any incident will occur within the enclosure that Astech build around a process.
Lind-Hansen told LabTechnologist.com that the capital costs of investing in an automation process are usually paid back within a year and a half.
