Baptiste Tauzin, Helena Bonin, Stephan Steigele, Cinzia Tarducci, Stephan Heyse, Genedata AG, Basel, Switzerland;
Alex Plotnikov, Noga Kozer, Haim Barr,
Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel

During the last decade, academic research has increasingly become involved with pharmaceutical drug discovery programs and started adopting related methods and strategies. The Weizmann Institute for Drug Discovery in Rehovot, Israel, provides such pioneering technologies to the research community. It has set up an innovative and efficient assay development and screening facility, supporting many screening technologies and enabling the detection of a wide array of biological processes.

One of the most recent additions to the pharmaceutical research toolbox is high-content screening in high-throughput (HT-HCS). The technology demands new systems able to cope with the complexity of the experimental questions and the sheer amount of data. This poster shows the technological infrastructure and its application to HT-HCS at the Weizmann Institute for Drug Discovery.

First, we illustrate the set-up of an academic small-molecule screening facility maintaining a diverse compound library of 100,000 molecules. The set-up comprises automated workstations and detection technologies for many biochemical and cell-based assays (fluorescence intensity, luminescence, TR-FRET, fluorescence polarization, automated microscopy for high-content screening) at a screening volume of 16,000 compounds per day.

Since this complex technological backbone also requires a streamlined yet flexible analysis technology, we show, secondly, how Genedata Screener® rationalizes and standardizes the analysis workflow for all assays on a single platform. It unifies quality control and analysis at all stages of a screening campaign, from primary screen to validation and on to comprehensive hit and lead identification using chemical and biological data across assays. Multivariate HT-HCS results are seamlessly processed while displaying any underlying HCS image with its result at any analysis stage.

Finally, we show how this state-of-the-art pipeline enables the screening of innovative targets such as Synaptojanin 2, placing the Weizmann Institute at the forefront of Screening.