Cell-based assays for high-throughput screening

Abstract

The fifth international World Pharmaceutical Congress was organised by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute and contained six concurrent conferences in parallel. This report focuses on the third annual conference: ‘Cell-based assays for HTS’. The major topics of this meeting were technologies for setting up screening assays, cells as biological reagents for screening campaigns, three-dimensional cell culture and the use of stem cells for drug screening. Technology-based presentations focused on the latest developments for cell-based screening, such as the open microscopy environment, a cell culture array as a kind of ‘cell culture on a chip’, a cellular microarray for analysing the binding behaviour of cells and aptamer technology. Further talks described success stories using the β-galactosidase enzyme fragment complementation assays from Applied Biosystems (InteraX) and from DiscoveRx for the drug discovery process. Other presentations focused on the Cell Sensor Technology from Invitrogen and a dual luciferase-based technology for G-protein-coupled receptors from Promega. One talk presented a comparison of fluorometric laser imaging plate reader system and ion works devices for ion channel-based assays, as well as the challenges facing high-throughput screening (HTS) of ligand gated ion channels. Two lectures highlighted the growing role of three-dimensional cell culture and the potential use for drug discovery. A key point of interest was also the role of cells as a reagent in an HTS environment and the attempts made by different companies to overcome issues for cell-based screening campaigns. In this context, several talks focused on the use of frozen and/or division-arrested cells for drug discovery processes. An interesting topic, the use of stem cells in the drug discovery process, was covered by two presentations.

Keywords::

• cell-based screening
• imaging
• screening technology
• stem cell
• three-dimensional cell culture

Acknowledgements

The author thanks M Valler for his critical review of the manuscript.