Throughput Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Throughput is a term used in a number of fields. In industry, it denotes the amount of raw material that a processing plant handles in a set amount of time. In the computer world, it is the amount of work a computer system or a component does in a specified amount of time. In the pharmaceutical industry, it signifies chemical screening technology used to manufacture drugs.

Throughput, when denoting a processing plant, can refer to any kind of processing plant such as an oil refinery that can handle a given number of barrels of oil per day. It may be a gas pipeline or an oil pipeline. Or throughput may refer to the loading facilities in a port and depot or some other point of debarkation or embarkation.

In the case of a gas pipeline the volume of natural gas that can be pumped through it in a given period of time such as a 24-hour day is very important information to planners. As long as demand for natural gas is steady the throughput will be a supply that is sufficient to meet demand. However, if a severe and prolonged period of freezing weather occurs it may well be that the carrying capacity of the pipeline is inadequate. It means that the volume of gas that can be delivered will not meet demand. If this should occur then the natural gas available for heating, for industrial use, or for other purposes may not be sufficient. As a result, people may freeze to death, or contract serious illnesses, or suffer injuries due to frostbite or other effects from the loss of heat. Planners are dependent upon accurate statements of the throughput of many resources.

Computer technology uses the term throughput to measure the effectiveness of large computers that run a number of different programs at the same time. Early in the history of computers their power was assessed by the number of jobs they could handle when bundled into batches of different jobs for a single day. Later computer operations used the term to measure the productivity of a computer in terms of its performance. The performance was the time it took from input to output. The time was reported as the computer’s response time. The term has since come to mean the speed at which data is transferred between receptors. Since there are a number of factors that can interfere with data transfers it is a measure of its final communication time.

The notion of throughput is now being using in the pharmaceutical industry. Advances in several sciences have led to the development of many new drugs. The human genome project has greatly increased knowledge of human genes. Because there are thousands of proteins in human DNA, the knowledge is now available for seeking new receptors for drug testing as possible medicines. Since all drugs are chemicals that have an effect on some target such as an organ, a bacterium, a nerve cell, or even a plant cell, the development of new drugs is now using high throughput technology.

The development of robot chemistry toward the end of the 20th century has made it possible to assembly in combinations and permutations vast numbers of chemicals that can then be tested on the thousands of receptor sites in proteins that represent human organs or body parts, or that represent those of animals in veterinary medicine. The chemistry techniques that have been developed allow a single chemist to develop thousands of new compounds each week. Previously, a skilled chemist would have done well to develop one or two chemicals in a week.

Many new companies have arisen that synthesize chemical libraries. These libraries contain thousands or millions of chemicals. The data for these is stored in computers allowing them to be tested at different receptors in a test tube or cell culture. Pharmaceutical companies can buy high throughput technology systems in order to test for some target receptor that is of interest to it. Using the computer’s database of chemical formulas it is possible for a pharmaceutical company to screen as many as a million chemicals against a chosen receptor site in only a month.

It is possible to design throughput libraries so that the natural characteristic of a receptor is presented with a library of chemicals. The chemicals can be reduced to those that are viewed as most likely to be matched and lock into the site. The goal is to use the throughput screening in a search for responses at receptor sites to chemicals being tested. With the vast number of new synthesized chemicals that can now be made throughput technology allows testing on a large scale at high speeds. This reduces the cost and time for developing new drugs significantly.

From the process of mass screening those compounds that show some effects are those that warrant further investigation. Those chemicals that do not show results are not abandoned because they may prove useful in future trials. Rather, they are returned to the library for another day’s testing against another receptor site. The number of receptor sites is growing rapidly as knowledge about cells, genes, and the use of gene splicing is increasing.

Bibliography:

K. Atterwill, W. Purcell, and P. Goldfarb, eds., Approaches to High Throughput Toxicity Screening (CRC Press, 1999);
Thomas Corbett, Throughput Accounting (North River Press Publishing Corporation, 1999);
John P. Devlin, High Throughput Screening: The Discovery of Bioactive Substances (Marcel Dekker, 1997);
James Kyranos, ed., High Throughput Analysis for Early Drug Discovery (Elsevier Science & Technology Books, 2004);
David Wells, High Throughput Bioanalytical Sample Preparation: Methods and Automation Strategies (Elsevier Science & Technology Books, 2003).