For drug discovery teams advancing complex peptides, small molecules and new modalities, IRBM’s expanded Purification and Automation Suite delivers a faster, more reliable path from synthesis to high-quality data required to drive confident decisions at every stage of the program.
This expansion reflects IRBM’s broader commitment to building the infrastructure, expertise, and integrated workflows that de-risk drug discovery and accelerate program progression from hit identification to candidate selection.
As drug discovery programs grow in complexity, purification has emerged as one of the most consequential bottlenecks in the path from synthesis to biological evaluation. Today’s pipelines span a diverse range of modalities, including small molecules, PROTACs, RNA binders, and peptides; each presenting distinct structural and physicochemical challenges that demand more than a one-size-fits-all approach to purification.
IRBM has invested strategically to meet this challenge. The expansion of our purification and automation suite represents a significant step forward in our integrated drug discovery capabilities enabling higher throughput, greater reproducibility, and faster delivery of assay-ready compounds.
Doubling Purification Capacity with Waters® FractionLynx™ Systems
The strategic core of this expansion is the installation of two additional Waters® FractionLynx™ MS-directed automated purification systems, doubling IRBM’s existing automated purification capacity. This technology combines mass-directed fraction collection with automated sample handling, enabling scientists to purify complex compound mixtures with high selectivity and minimal manual intervention.
This capacity increase directly addresses one of the most common bottlenecks in medicinal chemistry campaigns: the time between compound synthesis and the availability of purified, characterized material for biological evaluation. With greater parallelization, IRBM can now support larger compound libraries and more ambitious synthesis programs without compromising on purity thresholds or turnaround time.
Greater system redundancy also reduces operational risk, ensuring continuity across multi-compound campaigns even during scheduled maintenance, and maintaining the reliability that partner programs depend on.
Tackling Challenging Separations with Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC)
Complementing this expanded capacity, IRBM’s purification laboratory also includes a dedicated Waters® Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC) purification system, a orthogonal and highly versatile tool for separations that reverse-phase methods cannot resolve efficiently.
SFC is particularly valuable in several contexts that are increasingly relevant to modern drug discovery programs:
- Chiral resolution: Separating enantiomers is critical for programs targeting chiral drug candidates, where individual stereoisomers can differ substantially in potency, selectivity, and toxicity profile.
- Complex scaffolds: Macrocyclic peptides and other structurally challenging molecules can present selectivity profiles that make reverse-phase purification suboptimal. SFC provides the orthogonality needed to resolve these separations cleanly, particularly where impurities elute in close proximity to the target compound.
- Green chemistry: SFC uses supercritical CO₂ as the primary mobile phase, significantly reducing organic solvent consumption, aligning with IRBM’s commitment to sustainable laboratory practices.
This strategic combination of Waters® technologies is central to IRBM’s commitment to scaling and streamlining purification workflows across peptides, small molecules, PROTACs, and emerging new modalities. Together, these systems form the backbone of the lab’s infrastructure, enabling high-throughput parallel purification while retaining the orthogonal flexibility needed to resolve even the most challenging separations.
By increasing system redundancy and automation, IRBM can now manage larger compound libraries while maintaining the highest quality standards and reducing turnaround times from synthesis to purified material availability.
Genevac Centrifugal Evaporation: Preserving Compound Integrity at Speed
Efficient solvent removal following Reverse-Phase Liquid Chromatography (RPLC) purification is a step that is easy to overlook but critical for compound quality. IRBM has integrated a Genevac HT-12 centrifugal[LM5.1] evaporation system (StepBio) to process fractions recovered from FractionLynx purification rapidly and reliably.
Genevac’s centrifugal evaporation technology offers key advantages over conventional rotary evaporation in a high-throughput laboratory context:
- Rapid parallel evaporation of multiple fractions simultaneously, reducing processing time
- Controlled conditions that preserve compound integrity and minimize degradation risk
- Compatibility with aqueous and organic solvent systems generated during RPLC and SFC purification
With this installation, IRBM becomes the first contract research organization in Italy to deploy a Genevac HT-12 system, underscoring its approach to selectively adopting best-in-class technologies that deliver measurable operational advantage.
Tecan Fluent Liquid Handler: Automating the Path to Assay-Ready Compounds
The final stage of the purification workflow, converting purified compounds into formats suitable for biological screening, has been automated through the integration of a Tecan Fluent liquid handling platform which manages a range of critical downstream sample preparation tasks:
- Vial weighing and taring for accurate gravimetric quantification of purified material
- Automated preparation of DMSO stock solutions at defined concentrations
- Generation of quality control (QC) plates for purity and identity confirmation
- Preparation of assay-ready compound plates in formats compatible with high-throughput screening workflows
By automating these steps, IRBM significantly reduces manual handling, eliminates a key source of variability, and ensures that every compound entering a biological assay has been prepared with the same rigorous, reproducible process. The result is higher-quality data and greater confidence in structure–activity relationship (SAR) interpretation.
Integrated Data Infrastructure and Operational Excellence
The value of automation is fully realized only when individual systems operate within a connected data environment. At IRBM, the purification and automation suite is embedded within our integrated research informatics framework, creating a seamless data flow from synthesis through purification to quality control and biological evaluation.
This integrated architecture delivers several tangible advantages for drug discovery programs:
- Full traceability: Every compound carries a complete, auditable history from synthetic route to purified batch, enabling rigorous data governance and confident decision-making.
- Reduced transcription errors: Automated data capture across instruments eliminates manual data entry, improving data integrity at every stage.
- Faster program progression: With synthesis, purification, and QC data consolidated in a unified system, teams can make informed go/no-go decisions faster — compressing the design–make–test–analyze (DMTA) cycle.
- Partner transparency: External collaborators benefit from consistent, structured reporting, with data delivered in formats that integrate directly into partner informatics systems.