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Press Release - for immediate release

13 August 2001

New Industrial uHTS Platform From The Automation Partnership Helps Enhance AstraZeneca Drug Discovery Efforts

The Automation Partnership (TAP) today announced that Asset, the company’s new concept in high throughput screening automation, has completed AstraZeneca’s Site Acceptance Testing (SATs).

Completion of the SATs is the final milestone in a two-year collaboration that began with a blueprint for the optimum screening automation platform. According to Dr. John Major of AstraZeneca, "Several years ago, we began thinking about the type of automation that we would need to satisfy our future high throughput screening (HTS) requirements. There were no systems available that met these requirements so we turned to TAP to design and build Asset to our specifications."

Richard Archer, president of TAP adds, "We were very fortunate to work with the experienced and strategic thinking team from AstraZeneca. Their experience in HTS combined with our expertise in engineering resulted in the design of a reliable, industrial screening platform that will meet the applications and throughput needs of screening groups in the entire pharmaceutical industry."

Asset is a completely integrated platform containing modules that perform all the steps necessary for a variety of high throughput assays from simple homogeneous methods to complex ELISAs and sensitive cell-based assays. Plates can be processed at a rate of one every 30 seconds and a single loading of 384-well plates allows the unattended processing of over 100,000 wells in as little as 4 hours. Asset is independent of assay technology and can use a variety of commercial plate readers and imagers.

Dr. Major continues, "Our experience with the two Asset systems that are now operational has exceeded our expectations. While throughput is always an important consideration, we are finding that Asset also provides a quality and consistency of results that we could not previously match. The versatility of Asset and the improved data quality will enable us to deliver an HTS service that better matches the needs of our drug discovery activities".

For further information, please contact:

York Way, Royston, Hertfordshire, SG8 5WY, UK
Tel: +44 1763 227200 Fax: +44 1763 227201

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