High Throughput Screening

High Throughput Screening (HTS) is a drug discovery technique which is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. It is a method that is using robotics, data processing and control software, liquid handling devices, and sensitive detectors to allow a researcher quickly conduct millions of chemical, genetic, or pharmacological tests. Creative Biolabs has set up a state-of-the-art HTS platform to support our customers' research. We provide both compound design and management automation services, and we are expert in adapting biological and biochemical bench-top assays into high throughput screens.

The key lab ware of HTS is the microtiter plate (microplates): a small container consists of an array of wells. In general, modern microplates for HTS have either 384, 1536, or 3456 wells. Most of the wells are filled with experimentally useful compounds, cells, enzymes, etc. An integrated robotic handling system consisting of one or more laboratory unit operations, such as sample transport, sample mixing, manipulation and incubation, as well as transporting vessels to/from other workstations. Readout and detection are carefully designed, optimized, and conducted to ensure accuracy within the process and repeatability between processes. Our HTS system can prepare, incubate, and analyze many plates simultaneously, which highly reduces the time scale of drug discovery, the labor involved and speeds the data-collection process.

Creative Biolabs has full-scale HTS compound libraries for different purposes. Our libraries include natural product library, target-specific libraries, FDA approved drug libraries, siRNA and shRNA libraries. All libraries are arrayed into micro-well plates enabling screening in a miniaturized form in 96, 384 and even 1536 well plates.

We have a strict quality control progress for the effectiveness of HTS processes. This can be achieved through proper experiment design, the use of positive and negative controls, the measurement of the differentiation degree between assays to identify inferior data and the development of effective quality control metrics.

Our capabilities include but not limited to:

1. HTS assay design and development. We design biochemical bench-top assays into multi-well plate format HTS assays as necessary.
2. Target identification. We have a subset of target libraries containing pharmacologically well-characterized targets in the most common classes (GPCRs, ion channels, kinase, nuclear receptors, etc.). Our target identification progress can also characterize the pharmacologic activity of a target and determine HTS feasibility.
3. Full-scale hit screening. We have a compound library containing greater than 600,000 unique pharmacological entities to conduct full-scale hit identification assays.
4. Drug repurposing. Creative Biolabs is able to detect drugs from thousands of off-patent medications and bioactive molecules by high throughput technologies.
5. Small-molecule purity and mass determination. Combined with LC-MS platform, the purity and molecular mass of a molecule can be determined.

HTS Based on Phage Display

Phage display technology is a screening technique for identifying ligands for proteins and other macromolecules in vitro. This technology has also proven to be a powerful tool for isolating ligands for drug discovery. As one of the well-recognized experts in phage display technology, Creative Biolabs provides professional phage display services helping our customers in high throughput screening.

Whole Peptide Library

Creative Biolabs provides the peptide drug screening based on our whole peptide library that nearly 500 million different polypeptide sequence information has been compressed into 80,000 polypeptides, therefore, can contribute to improving the screening efficiency to over 6,000 times.

To request other usages and additional information about the high throughput screening (HTS) program, please feel free to contact us or directly sent us an inquiry.

Reference

1. White RE (2000). High-throughput screening in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic support of drug discovery. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology 40: 133-157. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.pharmtox.40.1.133

For Research Use Only.