Screening In-Depth Focus 2013

• New approaches to cell based assays for high content screening and analysis
  (Anthony Mitchell Davies, Director Irish National Centre for High Content Screening and Analysis (INCHSA), Department Clinical Medicine, Trinity College Dublin / Alice Vajda, Postdoctoral researcher, Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity College Dublin / Sarah Louise Ryan, Laboratory Manager, Biocroi Ltd  / Laure Marignol,  Assistant Professor, Discipline of Radiation Therapy, Trinity College Dublin)
  High content screening and analysis (HCS/A) technologies have become widely adopted in both the academic and industrial research sectors over the last 10 years. The acceptance of these technologies has in the large part been due to their demonstrable utility as both drug-discovery and basic research tools, indeed these imaging technologies such as HCS/A have the capability of providing researchers with a ready means of performing both large-scale primary screens as well as permitting more detailed downstream analysis…
• Workshop Review: Biochemical assays for screening
  (Sheraz Gul, European ScreeningPort)
  Recent years have witnessed an expansion in the disciplines encompassing drug discovery outside the pharmaceutical industry. This is most notable with a significant number of universities worldwide now that host infrastructure such as compound libraries and automated screening centres. An archetypal small molecule drug discovery project will aim to identify chemical starting points that modify the functions of genes, cells or biochemical pathways. In some instances, these functions may be linked to disease processes and an opportunity will exist to further develop the probes into novel therapeutic agents. In small molecule drug discovery, the ultimate aim is to identify new therapeutics, an activity which for reasons of high risk and cost has historically been conducted within the commercial sectors…
• Reduce, reuse, recycle: how drug repositioning is finding its niche in drug discovery
  (Emma J. Shanks, Head of Screening, The Beatson Institute for Cancer Research)
  Despite continued and increased investment in R&D in recent decades, pharmaceutical companies have not delivered a proportionate number of truly innovative new drugs, but lack of success in transporting a drug through the entire drug development pipeline and delivering it to market does not necessarily equate with a wasted effort. In its journey, a drug will have been refined from a small molecule entity into a drug-like molecule with a strong affinity for its predicted target and a clear pharmacokinetic profile; thus, failure in clinical trials is predominantly observed as lack of efficacy against the intended disease indication rather than attributed to high toxicity or poor bioavailability. As such, there is a metaphorical landfill of drugs/drug-like molecules waiting to be salvaged from the scrapheap and recycled for another indication. Here we describe our eco-friendly mission to deliver new therapeutics for cancer from old drugs.
• Screening roundtable
  (Volker Eckelt, Multimode Detection Global Portfolio Director PerkinElmer / Dirk Ullmann, Executive Vice President Lead Discovery Evotec / Moderated by Luke Alderwick, Molecular Microbiology, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham)