Synthace announced a collaboration with Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. that will give Charles River clients access to Synthace’s approach to developing, automating, and transferring assays faster and more efficiently. The collaboration targets a long-standing bottleneck in drug discovery: building robust assays that transfer reliably across laboratories and equipment.
The collaboration builds on a proof-of-concept project in which Charles River used Synthace software to develop and transfer a 1536-well assay. The project implemented a design covering more than 700 experimental conditions across multiple laboratories and instruments, enabling rapid assay development and transfer at scale.
Reproducibility remains a persistent challenge for biology research and development teams. According to the announcement, 72% of researchers acknowledge a reproducibility crisis, with estimated costs reaching $100 billion annually in preclinical research. The collaboration aims to improve reproducibility through a new approach to assay development that supports consistency across sites.
Assays underpin drug discovery by providing insight into how molecules may become drugs, yet biological complexity often slows their development and transfer. These challenges create delays, introduce data variability, and frustrate project teams. While artificial intelligence accelerates areas such as target identification, it also increases the volume of experiments that require validation in wet labs, placing additional pressure on assay development workflows.
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Many R&D teams continue to rely on one-factor-at-a-time approaches, which limit experimental scope and consume time. In this collaboration, Synthace enabled Charles River to reduce risk in assay development and transfer by combining Design of Experiments, automation, and software. Although DoE offers clear benefits, teams often view it as complex and resource intensive, which leads to limited adoption.
With Synthace technology integrated into Charles River’s lab automation, teams implemented high-throughput DoE across multiple locations and users. The approach delivered more robust and insightful experimentation, rapid generation of conclusive data, and seamless transfer between laboratories and equipment.
“Computational biology has taken a significant leap forward with AI, but in doing so, the lab risks being left behind, advises Markus Gershater, CEO and co-founder of Synthace. "Combining DoE, automation, and software is the answer, as together they deliver a step-change in experimental power to unpick biological complexity. We call this High Dimensional Experimentation, and it will be the next generation of experiments for drug discovery.”
“Synthace allows us to conduct more technically demanding experiments with greater scientific rigour," adds Dr. Rob Howes, Senior Director of Small Molecule Discovery at Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. "With this, we know that the assays we’re developing are more robust, allowing a greater degree of certainty in the results we’re seeing, while also improving their reproducibility. In doing so, we’re dramatically reducing the amount of time we need to develop robust assays and ultimately speeding up this critical part of drug discovery.”
This article is a rework of a press release issued by Zyme Communications.
