The current cost of drug development is unsustainably high, being plagued by low clinical efficacy and late stage failures. There is growing need to rebalance early stage target discovery and validation, moving away from the common paradigm of ultra-high throughput screening against a single molecular target removed from its physiological/pathophysiological context. Evidence indicates more “first-in-class” FDA-approved drugs come from phenotypic screening compared to target-based approaches. Phenotypic screening represents a relatively non-biased, disease and patient-centric approach to drug discovery that embraces the complexity of living cells and tissues in order to identify effective treatments.

The project to create a National Phenotypic Screening Centre (UK- NPSC) was kickstarted with a £8M infrastructure award from the Scottish Government allowing the Scottish Universities Life Science Alliance (SULSA) to finance state-of-the-art robotics, instrumentation and computation. The UK-NPSC will be based at two sites: the University of Dundee and the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford. UK-NPSC will focus on screening chemical libraries in a smart cost-effective way in order to identify new drug candidates that address unmet therapeutic needs - particularly in complex multifaceted diseases. A key aim will be to capitalise on recent advances in more physiologically-relevant human cell and tissue/organoid culture systems, genome engineering and human stem cell-derived models. Its mission is to reduce the time and cost to translate basic research into a clinical setting by employing a greater proportion of complex human models along the drug discovery pipeline. Together the partnership will focus on operating a world-class phenotypic drug discovery facility that will collaborate with a wider network of centres from across the UK, Europe and beyond, to bridge between academia and pharma and drive innovation in the sector.