The Simple Modular Assay and Robotic Technology (SMART) Facility was established as a nonprofit initiative aimed at enhancing scope and objectives of academic research. The lab was launched in 2002 with support from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust, and partnered with the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine in 2005.

Located at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of the Mount Sinai Hospital, in the heart of Toronto's academic network and Discovery District, the Facility assists in the development of assays for large-scale applications and offers access to robot-assisted technologies for the design, validation, and execution of experimental procedures under high-throughput conditions. An integrated framework for data management is available to facilitate and accelerate data analysis and secure contextual information for reliable interpretation of the results.

The laboratory, housed in an area of approximately 700 sq.ft., consists of two independent, robotic core systems adequately equipped and configured to accommodate the widest array of assay types in either 96-, 384-, or 1536-well formats. Technical capabilities are further enhanced by additional instrumentation utilized for offline exercises performed during assay development and validation, and routine procedures such as large-scale PCR plate setups, realiquotting of libraries, printing chemical libraries as microarrays, and crystallography trials.

The SMART Facility routinely engages in screening programs geared toward the identification of novel molecular effectors having a biologically-relevant significance within a given cell signalling pathway or a direct therapeutic potential. Different screening rationales are made possible by well-diversified collections of test compounds, that include bioactive- and pharmacologically-active molecules, FDA-approved drugs, drug-like chemicals, natural and seminatural products. In addition, the SMART Facility can make available human and mouse, genome-wide siRNA libraries and more than 800 microRNA mimic and inhibitors (libraries).

We strongly believe that by providing local and external academic communities with the opportunity to access high-throughput technologies, which can be difficult to undertake independently through traditional grant support, research programs of the post-genome sequence will receive a qualitative boost. In turn, this should lead to a narrower gap between basic biomedical research and translation into drug discovery.

As shown by the publications of Facility users, the most straightforward benefits for researchers implicate the identification of novel biochemical effectors for the elucidation of molecular mechanisms within physiological and pathological conditions, validation of "druggable" targets, selection of "lead" molecules for potential use as innovative therapeutics and repositioning of known drugs to new indications.

For the SMART Facility, similar to any academic laboratory devoted to the development and execution of a large variety of robot-assisted technologies, a critical challenge is to maintain an optimal balance between instrumentation flexibility, consistency of data, assay capacity and throughput. In particular, an essential condition for successful outcomes is the optimal integration of scientific rationales, experimental designs and robotic functionality around an intelligent arrangement of key peripherals. To safely streamline high-throughput programs and comply with diverse and demanding screening initiatives - a key mandate of any academic Facility - robotics must feature precision and speed combined with robust adaptability of both hardware and software options to the largest selection of technical applications. Thus, efficient programs for instrumentation maintanance and repair, as well as calibrations, alignments and quality control plans are crucial to ensure optimal performances. To this end, service agreements with manufacturers and the assistance of skilled personnel with solid background in assay development, engineering and computer sciences, including statistics and bioinformatics, are consistently taken as mandatory commitments notwithstanding their significant financial impact.