Screening Europe 2010: an update about the latest technologies and applications in high-throughput screening

Abstract

This article reviews important presentations from the 7th Screening Europe Conference, and extracts general trends and developments. Technological advances, as well as novel applications are discussed, thus providing an overview on state-of-the-art high-throughput screening. Among other topics, cell-based assays were highly popular, since they reflect the clinical situation much more closely than screens based on purified drug targets. A further approach to reduce the costly attrition of drug candidates subsequent to initial screens is the use of label-free technology. By measuring desired properties directly, without the use of any reporter (e.g., calorimetric measurements of binding affinities), the selection of false positives can be decreased drastically. Additional improvements in high-throughput screening are resulting from novel technology platforms utilizing sophisticated imaging systems and/or miniaturization. These and other important topics from the Screening Europe 2010 Conference are discussed in this article, thus providing a current snapshot of the field.

Keywords::

• cell-based assays
• cytotoxicity
• fragment-based screening
• high-throughput screening
• label-free screening
• microfluidics

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The author is an inventor on patents related to assays and technologies described in this article and could potentially benefit from corresponding revenues according to the inventor reward schemes of several academic institutions. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.