Advantages and application of label-free detection assays in drug screening

Abstract

Background: Adoption is accelerating for a new family of label-free optical biosensors incorporated into standard format microplates owing to their ability to enable highly sensitive detection of small molecules, proteins and cells for high-throughput drug discovery applications. Objective: Label-free approaches are displacing other detection technologies owing to their ability to provide simple assay procedures for hit finding/validation, accessing difficult target classes, screening the interaction of cells with drugs and analyzing the affinity of small molecule inhibitors to target proteins. Methods: This review describes several new drug discovery applications that are under development for microplate-based photonic crystal optical biosensors and the key issues that will drive adoption of the technology. Results/conclusions: Microplate-based optical biosensors are enabling a variety of cell-based assays, inhibition assays, protein–protein binding assays and protein–small molecule binding assays to be performed with high-throughput and high sensitivity.

Keywords::

• cell-based assays
• label-free
• optical biosensors
• photonic crystal
• small molecule screening

Acknowledgements

BT Cunningham thanks, P Hergenrother and K Watkin at the University of Illinois, and L Chan, M Pineda, J Heeres and S Gosangari, who performed the assays shown in this review. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the NIH.

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