Medical technology company Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) and laboratory automation solutions developer Biosero have established a collaboration agreement to facilitate robotic integration with BD flow cytometry instruments to accelerate drug discovery and development. The first systems are expected to be available for research use later this year. The companies intend to develop new capabilities within BD's flow cytometer instrument software to be compatible with Biosero’s Green Button Go software, which will jointly support biopharmaceutical and contract research organizations with their custom research needs and enable easy integration with robotic arms. Traditionally, several steps in a lab’s flow cytometry workflow for drug discovery and development require manual processes. With robotic integration, these steps can become automated. For example, samples are typically loaded and analyzed on a flow cytometer one multiwell plate at a time, requiring a time-consuming manual step each time the multiwell plate is changed. With robotic arm integration, tens or potentially hundreds of multiwell plates can be automatically changed without human intervention.