Singapore, July 24 -- Australia's Monash University is partnering with key institutions to launch a $2.9 million national project, delivering a robotic laboratory capable of drastically speeding up the invention, trials and commercialisation of medicines by Australian researchers.

The nationally accessible facility, backed by a Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) National Critical Research Infrastructure grant, will house Australia's first automated system for high-throughput X-ray crystallography, often referred to as HTX, at the Australian Synchrotron in Clayton.

HTX is a powerful scientific technique that involves blasting tiny biological crystals with X-rays to map the exact 3D shape of disease-causing proteins - revealing how a mol...