The Wyeth-Ayerst Research (WAR) High Throughput Screening (HTS) group is responsible for supporting project teams from 6 different therapeutic areas and maintains HTS laboratories at 2 separate sites. In addition to providing assay development and HTS services, we are responsible for dissolving compounds in DMSO and formatting them into micro-titer plates for distribution inside and outside the company. The WAR corporate library has swollen over the past 10 years through merger activities and the acquisition of combinatorial chemistry collections. By mid-1999 we estimated that sample preparation, storage and retrieval were consuming more than half of our personnel and equipment resources, so we began a project to improve our sample management functions. We achieved greater efficiency almost immediately simply by consolidating responsibility for sample management to a small group of volunteer specialists. Further gains came from collapsing our old 96-well sample plate library into 384-well plates, but the manual storage and retrieval of sample plates in over 70 upright freezers was still a bottleneck. We therefore circulated a Request for Proposals to several leading vendors of automated storage and retrieval systems. After many presentations and extensive deliberation, we ultimately chose to avoid the standard approach of a large, complex, integrated system with multiple overlapping and interdependent functions and to invest instead in a novel hybrid system composed of modular units provided by 3 different vendors. (TekCel, The Technology Partnership and Packard/CCS) I will describe what wee building and why we chose this path. I will also update our progress as elements of the system have begun to arrive.

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?2002 Laboratory Robotics Interest Group