Four years after launching a remote-controlled robotic laboratory in San Diego, Eli Lilly is shipping the operation overseas. The Big Pharma is selling a majority of the Life Sciences Studio laboratory to Arctoris, a contract research organization with headquarters in Oxford, England and Boston.
“This acquisition substantially increases our data generation capacity, unlocking bolder and more ambitious possibilities, while delivering even greater project speed and throughput,” Arctoris CEO Tom Fleming said in a Sept. 13 release.
Lilly initially launched the Life Sciences Studio to expand their research footprint in San Diego, but with the sale the lab’s automation platform has been moved to Oxford. Tech company Strateos ran the lab for Lilly, providing cloud-based software that enables researchers to control robots and run their experiments remotely.
Lilly invested $90 million in 2017 to get their Lilly Biotechnology Center off the ground in San Diego, which housed the 11,500-square-foot Life Sciences Studio space.
With the acquisition, Arctoris is adding five new automated biochemistry modules, a new high-throughput screening module and an additional automated BSL2 cell biology module while also increasing its compound storage capacity to 4 million compounds, the company said in the release.
Arctoris said they expect their expanded lab capabilities to reduce project timelines for their clients and address reproducibility and data ambiguity issues that can come with human-led lab approaches. The CRO has been in boom times throughout the year, recently expanding their executive team as a result.
Lilly announced late last year that it was opening a third Gateway Labs location in sunny San Diego, to join its sites in Boston and San Francisco. The Gateway Labs are co-working spaces that researchers and companies can lease and also act as accelerators. Companies using the space could potentially receive Lilly backing, the company said at the time. The lab began accepting applications from biotech startups in June, the San Diego Business Journal reported.