Project Description:
Biological and chemical compound screening for new drug discovery is an emerging industry with the potential to improve the quality of human life. The need for High Throughput Screening (HTS) process of organic or synthetic compounds for investigating the effects on human cell functions has become increasingly important as a result of recent life threatening epidemics, ranging from SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) to terrorist threats (including poisoning by chemical agents.
Challenges:
- Current HTS process is planned and set up by operators according to the dynamically changing demand. Mainly making decision based on their experience, the operators may have wrong analysis results and prediction on the HTS process performance. The overall performance can be downgraded.
- Current HTS process is lack of equipments and methods that can help the operators to observe the real-time status of the system.
- Current HTS processes are mainly locally operated and monitored. Effectiveness and efficiency of HTS process are limited by the physical existance of the experts and the testing agents.
Goals:
- Providing the capability of HTS process modeling and enabling the dynamic scheduling of human/equipment resources.
- Developing the capability for automated monitoring of the status of HTS process in order to reduce operator workload and increase the number of processes that can be managed by a single operator (i.e., the overall productivity of testing facilities).
- Providing network-based access to HTS process for developing nations and new biotechnology companies in order to promote the creation of medicines, vaccines, etc. to deal with new diseases, biological and chemical threats by terrorists and to promote the effectiveness and efficiency of use of screening processes.
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