SPaRCS: Accelerating Science With Technologies Never Before Seen

Hi, I’m Andrew Radosevich, and I’m David Chang-Yen, and we’d like to introduce you to AbbVie’s Specialized Research in Chaotic Systems team, or SPaRCS for short. 

When existing research tools are incapable of pushing biomedical discoveries to the next level, scientists at AbbVie look to us to invent enabling technologies that do not yet exist.

But building what’s never existed takes a special team.

A team of dedicated problem solvers who can cut through the red tape, exploit cutting-edge technologies, and question or clash with convention to think beyond the status quo.

That’s us. We’re SPaRCS, an eclectic group of rocket and marine engineers, microfluidic experts, and computer, data and software junkies working together to overcome some of the most challenging problems in pharmaceutical research.

AbbVie expects us to go beyond existing paradigms to design and create the impossible. What we do enables scientists to discover and deliver life-saving therapies for patients.    

Since 1996, we’ve partnered with AbbVie’s R&D teams to develop more than 600 novel instruments – and counting – to help researchers transform molecules into successful therapies.   

But the drug discovery process is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Scientists must sift through hundreds of thousands of compounds just to identify a few potential candidates for the disease we are trying to treat. One common approach to accomplishing this relies on liquid chromatography mass spectrometry – or LCMS. It’s an effective process that’s widely considered the industry standard. But, it’s slow ... it can take several minutes to evaluate just a single sample ... and when you have hundreds of thousands of compounds to analyze, it delays scientists’ ability to find answers for patients who need them now.  

What if we could speed up the evaluation and assessment of these crucial compounds? Could there be a tool capable of processing samples exponentially faster? 

The answer, it turns out, is – yes.

How? We combined our fascination with high-power lasers, precision electronic timing circuits, and collaborative robotics to enable the fastest-ever label-free screening of millions of compounds ... 22 per second, to be exact. We call it infrared matrix-assisted laser desorption electrospray ionization or IR MALDESI   for short.

And it’s the result of the tenacity and determination of our SPaRCS team to prove how a single research instrument could be manipulated to speed up the process of drug discovery.    

SPaRCS is constantly creating groundbreaking instruments like this ... that shatter technological barriers ... generate decisive data to paint more complete pictures for researchers ... and ultimately help get more therapies to more patients faster.

The success of these inventions is what inspires and drives us to continue thinking big – and beyond -- to improve the drug development process and help bring the impossible to life.     

So, what’s next? We hope to share our technological solutions with the world so that every patient ... everywhere ... can benefit!

There’s no slowing us down. 

Our vision is to continue devising technologies that burst through barriers and take us places we’ve never been, all with the sole objective of developing therapies that save people’s lives.