Accelerating Drug Discovery at Octant Bio using RACs for Cell-based Assays

Authors: Lizvette Ayala-Valdez, Jeff Tang Ph.D., Joshua Paul Ph.D., Jennifer Fredlund Ph.D.

Introduction

Octant is a platform drug discovery company focused on building small molecule correctors. These are drugs that address the large (and underserved) class of diseases resulting from protein misfolding and mistracking by correcting the underlying dysfunction, thereby restoring proper folding and tracking pathways. Because the underlying biology plays out in a complex cellular context, traditional drug discovery approaches that consider a protein in isolation – either biochemically or computationally – are not well suited to building correctors. Octant's platform uses synthetic biology to build reporters for these mechanisms in human cells. These cellular assays are coupled with high throughput nanoscale chemical syntheses, enabling an iterative, scaled, and empirical exploration of chemical space to identify and evolve drug candidates.

In practice, producing quantitative data reliably and consistently from cell-based assays, especially at scale, is incredibly challenging. Moreover, each drug program develops a diverse set of such assays (varying in cell types and mechanisms) and uses chemical inputs specic to the underlying mechanism of the disease. Octant executes this heterogeneous and dynamic set of assay workows using a exible Recongurable Automation Cart (RAC) system from Ginkgo Bioworks. This application note details how Ginkgo’s RAC technology enables Octant to produce consistent, high-quality data while also providing the scale required to drive rapid iteration and progress across several drug programs with a remarkably lean team.