An Inside Look at ARRALYZE

The journey an established technology company is making into the life sciences market to improve drug screening.

The journey of drug development is a long one, taking 10 - 20 years, costing billions in funding and offering less than 10% of success when entering phase I of clinical trials. Even finding a drug candidate in the pre-clinical phase is a tedious screening process in which hundreds of thousands of compounds are tested against potential disease targets.

Now, an established technology company is looking to make the process for drug screening less intensive for those working in the lab. Entering a new market is never easy, but that’s exactly what LPKF is doing with its foray into life sciences under the brand ARRALYZE.

A supplier of laser-based solutions for the technology industry, LPKF recently developed a new technology which can introduce microfeatures into glass. Called Laser Induced Deep Etching Technology (LIDE), the solution caught the attention of the life sciences sector due to its applications in the lab.

For instance, LIDE processes glass, which allows for a range of optical techniques in that it’s inert and can be used without the worry of it influencing the experiments, as in some plastics, and its variety of surface chemistry enables the binding of anchor molecules easily to the surface.

“So even though glass has these great properties there were no processes available that allowed to introduce microfeatures with very small volume in the picoliter to nanolitre range with high quality or in an economical manner for high volume production. This unique combination of characteristics is what made customers in the life sciences interested in our LIDE technology,” says Dr Robin A. Krüger, head of Product Management and Innovation ARRALYZE at LPKF Laser & Electronics AG.

Indeed, ARRALYZE is making microarrays manufactured with LIDE the centrepiece of its platform, a customisable workstation which is able to precisely print living cells, reagents and the like into glass wells. The platform has been designed to carry out high throughput single cell screening experiments and Krüger explains to me how the ARRALYZE arrays “can provide hundred thousand or even millions of individual wells on the footprint of a microscope slide – a number no human can scan through manually.”

The reason this is important, Krüger tells me, is that for experiments such as drug screenings, it’s necessary to control the composition of each glass well very precisely. Certain materials can absorb drugs, making the experiment useless since it then affects the drug’s concentration and how much for instance a tumour type might be exposed to. Glass is the perfect material then, Krüger says as researchers can be sure they’re not being misled during experiments, as the material doesn’t take up drugs or other reagents.

In ARRALYZE’s case, researchers benefit from being able to run hundreds of thousands of experiments at the same time at a much lower cost due to the platform requiring a lower number of convention labware.

ARRALYZE is an open platform, which makes sense when Krüger starts talking about the democratisation of scientific techniques that can help foster innovation throughout the industry, particularly in academia.

“Enabling for example PhD Students to just buy small numbers of glass arrays that they load randomly for their experiment with cells, without the need to buy the workstation or allow our customers to downsize their assays with the chemistry that they prefer, will lead to much more innovation over time than a fully closed ecosystem.”

ARRALYZE, which is entirely customisable through its workstation, the arrays that are used and the chemistry involved, will also be available as an out-of-the-box product, something which Krüger thinks larger pharmaceutical organisations will appreciate more than those experimenting in academic environments.

Of course, entering a new market is never easy, even for a company as established as LPKF, but doing so in the middle of a pandemic is almost unthinkable. Krüger though was surprised at how fast LPKF managed to adapt to the safety measures put in place due to Covid-19.

“I personally was quite concerned that this will paralyse us for many months to come since the collaborative interaction within LPKF was always a huge part of how we worked,” he says. “But my concern was pretty much unfounded. Actually, very quickly the company as a whole - not only individual people - found a way to synchronise with each other and figured out how to interact sufficiently with each other.” 

For ARRALYZE the situation was made even more challenging. The life sciences industry has seen countless exhibitions cancelled or postponed and travel restrictions have stopped companies from meeting up with potential clients. The removal of such events and opportunities meant that LPFK’s “marketing plans vanished into thin air,” as Krüger describes.

Like many companies though, LPKF adapted to the changing circumstances and has managed to stay in touch with existing customers, and has also utilised remote technologies to compensate for some of the “missed opportunities that would have been available without Covid-19,” Krüger says.

And if Covid-19 did affect LPKF’s working operations, it hasn’t changed the company’s plans for the rest of 2020.

“A huge portion of our efforts with ARRALYZE will focus on discussing with collaboration partners and lead users the final details of features we should implement into the workstation – mostly as software features and automated routines,” Krüger says.

The reason the company wants to focus on this is due to all labs having very different ways of working, through routines, infrastructure and needs, so LPKF wants to make ARRALYZE as accessible as possible. The company is now looking for partners to work with to assess the pros and cons of the platform’s various features.

So, a stressful 2020 for LPKF but one which should, if all goes well, lead to fruition in a new market for the company. And whilst the pandemic has meant a change to working lifestyles, Krüger thinks that the skills learned during this time will be beneficial once the pandemic is over.

“We will take many tools and habits that have proven to be helpful into the time after Covid-19. But I am really looking forward to the time when things go back to normal and our work days are only controlled by the needs of our developments and the projects we are working on.”