PRLog (Press Release) –
Mar 25, 2008 – Dr. Jeremy Caldwell, Executive Director of Molecular and Cell Biology at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation will give the Featured Presentation at GTCbio’s 4th Assay Development & Screening Technologies Conference, June 5-6, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. Dr. Caldwell will discuss broad functional profiling of molecular libraries against biological space.
Over the past ten years, advances in high throughput screening, robotics, combinatorial chemistry and assay technology have set new standards in drug discovery lead generation. Despite these capabilities, the failure rate of drug candidates in the clinical and pre-clinical phase is still high, primarily due to unexpected biological side-effects. Profiling of lead compounds across batteries of biologically relevant assays could identify untoward side-effects early in pre-clinical discovery but also beneficial properties such as alternative indications, orphan target modulation, and new biology. Whole cell systems represent an attractive milieu to perform profiling experiments since they encode all the components involved in signaling pathways, however, no robust and systematic method exists to opportunistically interrogate molecular function broadly in cellular assays.
In seeking to address this problem, Dr. Caldwell and his group have developed an approach, which affords rapid, cost-effective broad-based cell biological assay profiling in parallel against molecular libraries. The group has engineered an industrial scale automated compound profiling (ACP) system, which consists of an automated tissue culture system for propagating cell-based assays integrated with a system for automatically performing miniaturized assays in 384 or 1536-well micro-plates. The ACP can rapidly test thousands of compounds, in replicates, simultaneously in dose-response against 100s of unique cell-based assays in a single experiment. While the ACP can be used to rank compounds from HTS campaigns, it can also identify unwanted and desirable activities in pace with lead optimization, identify small molecule ligands for orphan targets/diseases and even pre-qualify chemical libraries by functional characterization, and by virtue of focusing on cells, the ACP concept can be extended to other library types including peptides, antibodies, secreted proteins, siRNAs, cDNAs, natural products and known drugs.
GTCbio's 3rd Assay Development and Screening Technologies conference will provide attendees with critical information to utilize in the discovery and development of assays, while keeping them informed about the latest screening technologies for both high-throughput screening and high-content screening. Topics being covered include cell based assays, high throughput screening, high content screening, in vitro assays and screening, novel assay and screening technologies, and target validation. For more information visit www.gtcbio.com.
