Therapeutic Antibody Development: The Importance of Plate Map Design
Therapeutic antibodies are now the predominant class of new drugs. Advancing safe, effective antibodies to the clinic requires narrowing a pool of thousands of candidates using high-throughput microplate-based assays. Designing plate maps for these assays using Excel or outdated digital tools is a time-consuming task prone to error, slowing the screening process and leading to critical errors in data analysis. Using LIMSense, a modern LIMS from AduroSys, can improve data quality, reduce costs, and ensure the most effective antibodies reach patients.
The first step in narrowing the pool of candidate antibodies is a high-throughput primary screen to identify those candidates with the strongest binding affinities to the selected antigen. These screens must rapidly and accurately assay thousands of antibodies, a task that is often bottlenecked at one of the first steps: designing plate maps.
The Importance of Plate Map Design and Common Pain Points
When dealing with hundreds of samples across multiple plates, utmost care must be taken when creating plate maps — designating which wells will contain which antibody candidate — so that accurate data capture and analysis can be achieved. If you’ve used paper notebooks, Excel spreadsheets, or legacy ELNs and LIMS — or any combination of the above — to accomplish this task, then you’ve likely experienced first-hand their limitations:
● Manual data entry into Excel spreadsheets or legacy ELNs/LIMS is prone to error.
● Assigning metadata to samples is painstaking and requires the use of multiple worksheets when using Excel or other inadequate tools.
● Legacy ELNs/LIMs are often unintuitive, requiring workarounds.
● Use of inadequate tools requires researchers to manually curate data for data analysis, which is time-consuming and prone to error.
All of these limitations lead to inaccurate data analysis, wasted time and resources, preventing timely and accurate identification of the best antibody candidates.
A Modern LIMS for Plate Map Design
Would you like to turn plate map creation into a stress-free, simple and efficient process? If so, try LIMSense™ by AduroSys.
It is a modern-cloud-based LIMS for sample tracking, inventory, and plate management created with the scientist in mind. It was developed to specifically address the pain points you have experienced in creating plate maps for experiments where accuracy is of utmost importance — like therapeutic antibody development.
● Easy to use, intuitive graphical interface
● Use templates to increase reproducibility or create new maps from scratch
● Choose which samples you want in which wells, and easily move groups of samples to new wells
● Create plate maps for any size microplate
● Quickly and easily add metadata such as antigen, antibody candidate, interaction conditions, and more to your samples
● 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 primary screens should not be underestimated: accurate, rapid plate map creation saves time, makes labs more efficient, and reduces costly errors. LIMSense™ can also be used to facilitate therapeutic antibody secondary screens by facilitating rapid and easy plate re-array using its intuitive interface. You can also automatically import your plate maps to your instrument(s) and 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.
