The High Throughput Screening Facility Housed in the UI College of Pharmacy allows university researchers to develop tools that massively scale up and speed up their experiments.

The equipment uses a combination of miniaturization, robotics, and data management software to accomplish many thousands of individual experiments in rapid, parallel fashion, generating large data sets. (In a single day, high throughput robotics on the UI campus can perform up to 50,000 experiments!) It helps them identify clinically-significant drug discovery targets, and probes for biological functions of novel targets.

This tells researchers what compounds work and why they work.

For biomolecular researchers, this type of screening is an increasingly important tool.

“We use high throughput screening to obtain lead compounds to probe the biology of protein targets that we investigate. Some of these leads have the potential to validate a target as something one wants to modulate in disease. In addition, this is increasingly how one identifies drug-like molecules for further development.”
-Charles Brenner
Former Professor and Head of the Department of Biochemistry,
Carver College of Medicine

The current robotic platform was funded by a 2011 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, after substantial interest and investment from investigators campus-wide. The group financially supported an initial, quick purchase of a less extensive robotic system that served their immediate needs.

The facility serves as a hub to promote collaboration from across disciplines at the university and beyond.

Its scalable screening approaches:

• Foster hit and lead generation for drug discovery and development through screening of large chemical/biologics libraries; and
• Facilitate molecular probe discovery for mechanism of action (MOA) studies of chemical biology, through screening of focused intellectually-designed compound collections.