Therapeutic antibodies are a revolutionary drug class that can treat a wide range of diseases, from cancer to autoimmune disorders. Secondary screens characterize the functional properties of candidate antibodies, narrowing the pool to those most likely to succeed in clinical trials. The wide range of micro-plate based assays that can test hundreds of variables at once requires accurate and complex plate maps that capture a variety of plate re-array options. Using LIMSense™, a modern LIMS from AduroSys, can ensure you keep track of all of your samples and identify the best antibodies for further development.
Why You Need to Re-array Plates and Common Pain Points
Secondary screens comprise a range of functional and phenotypic assays to assess candidate antibody specificity, potency, and toxicity. Individual antibodies may undergo several of these tests to fully characterize how they work (or don’t) so the best candidates may be prioritized for further development.
This requires creating plate maps that accommodate a range of scenarios, such as placing the same antibody in multiple wells of the same plate, each with a different “external” variable (such as cell type, pathogen, etc.) or transferring a subset of samples from a larger plate to a smaller plate that will be used to run a different assay.
Systems that might just get by with simple, basic plate mapping just don’t cut it for the more complex assay combinations performed during antibody secondary screens.
Manual manipulation of spreadsheets or other inadequate tools is prone to error — are you sure you copy-pasted the correct wells between plates?
Keeping track of different sub-plates and parent-child sample relationships is next to impossible when using spreadsheets, with mistakes easily made if you lose track of which spreadsheets you’re manipulating
Outdated, inadequate tools don’t preserve metadata across plates, requiring error-prone, time consuming manual data entry
All of these limitations make it easy to add the wrong samples to the wrong wells, perform experiments more than once, or perform the wrong experiments on the wrong samples, wasting time and money and preventing accurate assessment of antibody potency, efficacy, and safety.
A Modern LIMS for Plate Re-array
Would you like to turn plate re-array into a simple and efficient process so you can make sure you’re running the right experiments every time? If so, try LIMSense™ by AduroSys.
It is a modern-cloud-based LIMS developed to specifically address the pain points you have experienced in going beyond basic plate mapping:
Easy to use, intuitive graphical interface simplifies sample replication in a single plate or across plates
Split plates of any size into any number of plates of the same or different sizes
Preserve metadata such as antigen, antibody candidate, and interaction conditions across split plates
Quickly and easily merge wells from the same plate or across plates
Create a single template that can be used for as many plates as you need, increasing reproducibility, saving time, and maintaining sample lineage and traceability
Process multiple plate maps at once, preparing plate maps for hundreds to thousands of samples in only minutes.
The Impact of a Modern LIMS
The impact that an easy-to-use LIMS can have on the success of secondary screens should not be underestimated: accurate, rapid plate re-array significantly reduces human error, making labs more efficient and decreasing the time needed for antibody discovery and development.
The plate maps created with LIMSense™ can be quickly and easily formatted for your laboratory instruments and automatically uploaded. You can also import instrument measurement files back to LIMSense™, and consolidate all measurements and sample metadata for easy systematic data analysis.
To learn more about how LIMSense™ can advance your therapeutic antibody development — or any other research question requiring high-throughput, accurate plate mapping — request a demo today.