Any compound management folks out there? I’m setting up a compound management function, no huge libraries or automated storage but we need to know what and where are compounds are. I’d love to chat with folks who are experienced in this area and see if there are critical requirements / must-haves that we’re missing.
Here’s what we’re doing:
Registration of new molecules (all modalities) to assign a unique ID
Barcode tracking of all labware & stocks of material through their lifecycle
Freezer / inventory tracking so we know where everything is
Basic request fulfillment so that scientist can order from the inventory
Some data automation so that assay data & metadate can automatically be associated with the compounds via the unique ID
Maybes someday we’ll do:
QC of received material to confirm its what we were promised
requests of weighed out powder
assay ready plates or complex order fulfillment
I’d appreciate experience folk’s thoughts on specific tools or what’s missing or more difficult than anticipated. If you’re willing to chat - please message me.
What you’re missing most likely comes down to how large you think your library is going to be. 1000 compounds? 10k? 100k?
Are you going to receive compounds already diluted (in DMSO?) or in powder form? If you have to do the dilutions the automation I’d invest in is a used Tecan Evo to do the dilutions for you. Run DMSO as the system liquid and use fixed tips, very little waste and cheap to run/maintain.
Make sure you receive compounds in standard bottle sizes and reject those (if you have that option) that aren’t coming in the correct bottle type. Storing/handling 10s of different bottle types will kill you in the end. Give a chemist an inch, they’ll take the whole damn lab.
I think you’ll find a lot of compound management experience here as all of those processes have been automated for 20+ years and it’s pretty well sorted out these days.
Make sure you set up regular QC checks on your processes and have a recorded chain of custody for all samples. Sample managers are an easy scapegoat for assay problems.
Be sure what you are delivering is correct and be able to back it up. Be willing to track down issues when a problem comes up.
The hardest thing we had to QC was serial dilutions.
In case you have several batches of the same compounds you would want to track that too. It could be something as simple as a serial number suffix on the compound ID.
Tracking the labware type would be helpful too. Especially if at some point your workflow changes and you start to receive compounds in a different labware type.
This is huge. You’ll spend days looking for the root of the problem but it turns out the material received was not as clean or exactly what it said it was
Make sure you receive compounds in standard bottle sizes and reject those (if you have that option) that aren’t coming in the correct bottle type. Storing/handling 10s of different bottle types will kill you in the end. Give a chemist an inch, they’ll take the whole damn lab.
Trying our best on that… We’ll have a fair amount of control internally, but I think the majority of the material will be generated externally. And I’m really trying to get ahead of things by reaching out to the scientists early. Maybe I need to reach out to the contracts group though and get labware rules written into the contract template.
Make sure you set up regular QC checks on your processes and have a recorded chain of custody for all samples. Sample managers are an easy scapegoat for assay problems.
Also trying on this front. Initially we’ll just be returning tubes and vials to the requestors, but as we build out the processes, we’ll need to follow your suggestion.
This is huge. You’ll spend days looking for the root of the problem but it turns out the material received was not as clean or exactly what it said it was
We had our chemistry groups do the QC of what they submitted. For externally sourced compounds we required some basic QC, but I don’t recall exactly what QC they did. In the end if a compound ever became very interesting they would QC it to confirm identity. The majority of compounds aren’t really that interesting, I guess the idea was why waste a bunch of resources determining exact identity for compounds that aren’t interesting. But, this was for an HTS library in the 2M+ compounds.
We also would ship vials to external vendors for them to ship our purchased compounds back to us. This seemed like a fairly normal request, but did require some coordination early on. We’d also request two aliquots, one ready to solubilize and the other with the rest of the compound that they synthesized (if any was left over). This saved us a lot of time by not having to weigh out 2mg-5mg aliquots for solubilization.
