Australian-first platform cuts medicine research from months to days

A new $2.9 million national project led by Monash University is set to transform the way Australian scientists discover, evaluate and commercialise medicines, with the establishment of a robotic laboratory designed to dramatically accelerate drug development.

Supported through a Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) National Critical Research Infrastructure grant, the facility will house Australia’s first automated high-throughput X-ray crystallography (HTX) system at the Australian Synchrotron in Clayton. The advanced platform will provide researchers with rapid access to detailed structural information about disease-related proteins, helping scientists design and refine potential medicines with greater speed and precision.

Professor Martin Scanlon, Head of Medicinal Chemistry at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) within the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, said the technology would deliver an “incalculable ability” to expand Australia’s research capability and capacity while reducing development timelines and improving productivity.

“When we’re creating a new medicine, we need to design a compound to fit into a specific pocket of a protein, but the protein often changes shape in response. We might plug one hole only to realise the protein has shifted and created two more. Ultimately, the protein decides what fits,” Professor Scanlon said. “HTX allows us to rapidly capture those changes. It doesn’t instantly solve the puzzle, but it provides the real-time data we need to accelerate that iterative back-and-forth process, allowing us to incrementally build a successful compound.”

Traditionally, determining how drug candidates interact with disease targets has been a slow and highly manual process, requiring extensive laboratory work and repeated rounds of testing. The new HTX capability will significantly streamline this process by enabling researchers to collect structural data at unprecedented speed.

“HTX will attract investment, and importantly grow the Australian biotechnology and clinical trials economy as more partners invest locally to bring new clinical candidates to market,” Professor Scanlon said. “Analysis of drug discovery projects successful in generating a clinical candidate showed 65% relied on structural information, most of which were derived from X-ray crystallography.”

Professor Christopher Porter, Director of MIPS, said the HTX platform would reshape the drug discovery landscape by reducing months of intensive laboratory work to just days.

“HTX could allow us to screen a library of ~1,000 compounds automatically in three days without human intervention, which is well beyond what is currently feasible with manual data collection,” Professor Porter said.

The platform will also introduce crystallographic fragment screening, an emerging approach that allows researchers to test smaller components of molecules and identify which fragments interact most effectively with a disease target before combining them into a final therapeutic compound.

“Instead of looking for one giant, perfect molecule right away, fragment screening allows us to test small pieces or fragments of molecules to see which individual parts fit into the target best,” Professor Porter said. “Once we know which fragments stick, our medicinal chemists can pull that information together to build a single highly effective, custom-designed drug.”

By providing critical structural data earlier in the drug development pipeline, the platform aims to address a key barrier in translating biomedical discoveries into commercially viable medicines. It will also provide industry partners with greater confidence to invest in Australian biotechnology ventures.

“This platform gives our scientists the world-class engine they need to turn basic biomedical research into the life-saving medicines of tomorrow, ensuring more Australian discoveries are clinically tested and commercialised right here at home,” Professor Scanlon said.

The five-year project brings together the nation’s leading scientific and research organisations, including Monash University, ANSTO, the Australian Synchrotron, CSIRO, WEHI, Australian National University, University of Western Australia, University of New South Wales, Griffith University, University of Adelaide, La Trobe University and the University of Queensland.

Professor Robyn Ward AM, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) and Senior Vice-President at Monash University, said “This HTX capability will not only accelerate scientific discovery, it will help contribute to Australia’s biotechnology and clinical trials ecosystem, creating the conditions for more partnerships and investment, to help bring more important medicines for the community.”

The initiative forms part of the MRFF National Critical Research Infrastructure program, which is providing $600 million over 10 years from 2024–25 to 2033–34 to strengthen Australia’s capacity to conduct world-leading health and medical research. Funding through the program supports national capability-building across areas including innovation enablers, health care digitisation, co-investment partnerships and mRNA technology development.

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