Recent Advances in High-Throughput Automated Powder Dispensing Platforms for Pharmaceutical Applications

A wide array of pharmaceutical research studies involve dispensing a variety of powders such as active ingredients, intermediates, catalysts, and formulation excipients. Automated powder dispensing platforms are increasingly relied upon to perform the mundane task of filling vials in multi-well plates for high-throughput experimentation workflows. A small group of pharmaceutical scientists collaborated to evaluate recent advances in commercially available automation platforms from two instrument manufacturers using previously reported objective and systematic testing protocols. This manuscript details the testing conditions used for the evaluation and the results obtained and assesses the impact that the powder characteristics had on the performance of the selected platforms through statistical analysis.